Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language Audiobook

Quotes

• “Deliciously erudite.”

  — New York Times Magazine

• “A riveting detective story.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “Pinker’s enthusiasm for the subject infects the reader, particularly as he emphasizes the relation between how we communicate and how we think…Words and Rules is an excellent introduction to and overview of current thinking about language, and will greatly reward the careful reader with new ways of thinking about how we think, talk, and write.”

  — Amazon.com, editorial review

• “It is serious linguistic business that he [Pinker] is about, but what fun he has with it! Turning languages (mostly English) inside out, upside down and backward, he seeks to show through the way people say things something of how the mind works.”

  — Scientific American

• “Pinker argues that our brains exhibit both kinds of thought, and that we can see them both in English verbs: rule application (“combination”) governs regular verbs, memory (“lookup”) handles irregulars. The interplay of the two characterizes all language, perhaps all thought…crisp prose and neat analogies, makes required reading for anyone interested in cognition and language.”

  — Publishers Weekly