Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. - Review - book review

Words and Rules: The ingredients of LanguageSteven Pinker BASIC BOOKS, $26.

MOST OF US DON'T DWELL ON IRREGULAR verbs, except when they torment us in a foreign-language class. But for Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of two best-sellers about thinking, they provide a window into the basic mental mechanisms underlying our capacity for language. In his new book, Words and Rules, he uses regular and irregular verbs, as well as other parts of speech, to tackle one of linguistics' key issues.

Back in the 1960s, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky offered a revolutionary theory of how we produce language. He argued that a set of innate rules in the human mind allows us to mix and match words to form sentences that make sense. He called this somewhat mystical rule book "deep structure," and he used it to explain how language permits us to make "infinite use of finite media" as one linguist has put it. While most linguists accept Chomsky's theory; his critics hold an alternate view: that we learn to speak merely by trial and error, building up from memory the information and associations we need to assemble words into meaningful sentences.

Pinker bridges these two concepts, in part by softening Chomsky's hypothesis. As children, he contends, we learn rules that allow us to form endings to regular verbs. To support his point, Pinker cites common mistakes youngsters make in applying these rules to irregular verbs, such as "they goed to the store." For him, that's the Chomskian deep structure at work in our brains. Now, what about irregular verbs? Well, this is where the memory part of language learning comes in. Irregular verbs such as be, have, do, say, make, and go, says Pinker, tend to be the most frequently used. We learn to use irregular forms correctly by sheer force of repeated example. So, too, with recognizing families of other irregular verbs with similar conjugations, such as sing; sang; sung; or drink, drank, drunk. The resonance of these patterns in our memory allows us to assign the right endings to the right verbs. But when verbs fade out of usage, we forget their irregular formation. Who, for instance, recalls that the past tense of heave is hove?

To further his case, Pinker points out that different kinds of brain damage tamper with specific language-processing skills. People with Alzheimer's tend to have trouble recalling irregular verb forms. And those with Parkinson's, who suffer impairment of procedural brain operations, often cannot form complex grammatical sentences.

Pinker's argument is appealing, and Words and Rules brims with delightful data. Word-lovers may find themselves skimming the book for clever bits: reflections on why we refer to lowlifes, but not lowlives, tenderfoots instead of tenderfeet, or why a baseball player flied out instead of flew out. Still, much of his most convincing material is based on intuition and anecdote rather than overwhelming scientific evidence. What critics like English linguist Geoffrey Sampson, author of Educating Eve: The "Language Instinct" Debate, seem to find most irksome is Pinker's wholehearted promotion of a linguistic model that views the human capacity for learning language as distinct from other abilities, such as building bridges or writing symphonies.

To Sampson, the very notion of "mental machinery" for language--a term Pinker throws around a lot-turns us all into unimaginative robots. Still, when Pinker says that English speakers can construct one hundred trillion different 20-word sentences, should anyone feel diminished?

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