Pinker Steven. Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language

Basic Books, 2015. —384 p. — ISBN: 0465072704.Human languages are capable of expressing a literally endless number of different ideas. How do we manage it-so effortlessly that we scarcely ever stop to think about it? In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, a look at the simple concepts that we use to devise works as complex as love sonnets and tax laws, renowned neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker shows us how. The latest linguistic research suggests that each of us stores a limited (though large) number of words and word-parts in memory and manipulates them with a much smaller number of rules to produce every writing and utterance, and Pinker explains every step of the way with engaging good humor.