Words and Rules by Steven Pinker
“The ingredients of a language are words and rules. Words in the sense of memorized links between sounds and meaning, rules in the sense of operations that assemble the words into combinations whose meaning can be computed from the meanings of the words and the way they are arranged.” -Steven Pinker
What I learned from the book?
I learned that there's a lot behind language that we aren't really aware of. We just say what we think but rarely think about the process that's behind it. I realized that language is a very complex process that has been evolving throughout the centuries and will continue to do so. Also, that a vast majority of languages share greek or latin roots, it's impressive to see the similarities between German and English or Spanish and French. I found fascinating that every word has a history behind, and its definition may vary because of the evolution of its use throughout the centuries. It impacted me the power of the human mind, how it links, connects and memorizes in order to communicate with others. I think language is a survival tool that lead us to communicate our needs and wants. Without it, I dare to say that we wouldn't be where we are today. In this book I explored the nature of language, where did it arise from? What are its ingredients? Why is it a miraculous gift?
Favorite Quotes
Concepts
2. Symbols contained by the rules are symbolic and abstract.
3. Rules are combinatorial.
Morphology
Insights
I learned that there's a lot behind language that we aren't really aware of. We just say what we think but rarely think about the process that's behind it. I realized that language is a very complex process that has been evolving throughout the centuries and will continue to do so. Also, that a vast majority of languages share greek or latin roots, it's impressive to see the similarities between German and English or Spanish and French. I found fascinating that every word has a history behind, and its definition may vary because of the evolution of its use throughout the centuries. It impacted me the power of the human mind, how it links, connects and memorizes in order to communicate with others. I think language is a survival tool that lead us to communicate our needs and wants. Without it, I dare to say that we wouldn't be where we are today. In this book I explored the nature of language, where did it arise from? What are its ingredients? Why is it a miraculous gift?
Favorite Quotes
- "...the mind of the child is not a sponge, but actively assembles words and concepts into new combinations guided by rules and regularities".
- "Language comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is".
- "...the mind analyzes every stretch of language as some mixture of memorized chunks and rule.governed assemblies".
- "The meaning of a word is a link to an entry in the person's mental encyclopedia..."
- "Regular and irregular forms do not work in isolation; they are part of the integrated living system we call language".
- "Words and rules give rise to the vast expressive power of language, allowing us to share the fruits of the vast creative power of thought".
Concepts
- Words are a memorized pairing between a sound and a meaning.
- Rules are the code that specifies how words can be arranged into meaningful or coherent combinations.
2. Symbols contained by the rules are symbolic and abstract.
3. Rules are combinatorial.
Morphology
- By derivation: rules that form a new word out of old words.
- By inflection: rules that modify a word to play one specific role in a sentence.
- Mental lexicon: storehouse of memorized words.
Morphology: team of rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words.
Sintax: a set of rules that combine words into phrases and sentences.
Semantics: interface between language and mind.
Phonology: interface between language and the mouth and ear.
Listeme: a memorized chunk, an item that has to me memorized as part of a list. - Blocking principle is the irregular form that blocks the regular rule to state a past-tense irregular.
- We are constantly making lexical decisions in order to choose what words to combine and what to difference a word from something that looks like a word.
- We have created grammatical rules in order to have a framework to meaningfully combine symbols, phrases and sentences.
- Regular forms are generated by rules and irregular forms are retrieved from memory; the memory as linking patterns with patters as well as words with words.
- Language has two principles:
- A memory system that stores and retrieves words.
- A system of symbolic computation that generates grammatical combinations of words.
Insights
- We use more irregular verbs than the regular ones because we constantly repeat them to memorize them.
- The notion of the evolution of language as a broken telephone, in both pronunciation and spelling.
- We all make the same spelling mistakes when young because we think that everything should follow the regular rules, and its when we learn the irregular ones that we memorize them, and so the rules and words become part of our mental lexicon.
- Our brain is always working when we write, speak or think. It makes connections, links patterns and it finds words and rules retrieved from memory.
- Language combinations are infinite.
- New words may arise every single day, for instance the new verbs: tweeting, instagramming.
- Language is a very complex order and it's a never-ending process of evolution.