Words and Rules

Pinker’s third book in the collection and his most accessible, arguing that language runs on two systems — a memorised lexicon of words and a computational engine of rules — through the single test case of the English past tense. Copyright 1999, Basic Books; FIRST EDITION; ISBN 0-465-07269-0; set in Fairfield. The permissions page is a period piece in itself: Jean Berko Gleason’s drawing of the WUGS, alongside The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Family Circus and a New Yorker cartoon. Chapters include “The Infinite Library”, “Broken Telephone”, “Word Nerds” and “The Horrors of the German Language”.