Words and Rules
The Ingredients Of Language

Steven Pinker's work is generally very readable, and so he has become something of a champion popularizer of linguistics and all the fun, quirky, nifty tidbits of knowledge that come with the field. Unfortunately, he also does two things that annoy the hell out of me: 1) He writes from a controversia......more

Yikes - I went back and forth between two stars and three stars for this but in the end the star ratings said it all. Two stars - it was OK. three stars - I liked it. It was OK and I didn't really like it. This looked like a slam dunk. I loved the Blank Slate, liked Pinker's writing style in that an......more

If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Ins......more

Great book for people like me who are interested in linguistics. Beautifully and humorously written, it considers how our brains might be wired to give us instant and instinctual knowledge of how to properly use grammar. Yes, sometimes we goof, but that is the exception rather than the rule although......more

This man is a great writer. He explains familiar rules in a way that is not only more interesting and comprehensible than the standard expositions, but also gives you a completely new understanding of what the rule is about. That said, the book is very repetitive.The first three chapters are a very e......more