Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (ISBN 0060958405) is a 1999 popular linguistics book by Steven Pinker on the subject of regular and irregular verbs in the English language. In Pinker's words, the book "tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable."
The title, Words and Rules, refers to Pinker's model of how words are represented in the mind. He writes that words are either stored directly with their associated meanings, in what Pinker calls the "mental dictionary", or they are constructed using morphological rules. Leak and rose, for example, would be stored as mental dictionary entries, but the words leaking and roses do not need to be memorized separately, as they can be easily constructed by adding the appropriate suffixes. By analysing the English errors children make (such as overgeneralizing morphological rules to create words like mouses and bringed), he concludes that irregular English verbs are not remembered in terms of the rules that produce them (such as the rule that produces sleep/slept, weep/wept, keep/kept, etc.), and instead have their past tenses memorized directly.
"Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Steven Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.
External links
