Words and Rules

This book was written by Steven Pinker, and it basically talks about words, and the rules that you need to use these words. Since I started reading this book I've learned so many interesting facts about language, specifically about the english language, and since english is my second language I feel that this book will help me improve it a lot.

BOOK NOTES

- Language is: distinctive, essential, mysterious and practical.

- Language is vast expressive power.

- It's central to human life

- One important thing to understand is that language is NOT the same as: written language, proper grammar and thought.

- Linguistics study: grammar, phonology, semantics and pragmatics.

- Linguistics are a window into the human mind

Some questions that have come so far, that I think will help me understand more the book once I am able to answer them.

- What is a complex language?

- What is language?

- What is tacit knowledge?

- How do words and rules relate to each other?

- What is the phrase structure and how does it work?

- What is lexicon?

"the great debate between rationalism and empiricism is familiar to everyone who has taken a course in pholosophy, psychology, or the histroy of ideas. It embraces such issues as whether the mind is packed with innate structure or is a blank slate on which the enviornment writes..." Page 89

Rationalism: the idea that intelligence arises from the manipulation of symbols by rules, which is a major doctrine of the school of thought.

Words and Rules theory: not only focusing on associations, "words" relating to the memory and "rules" relating to the associations.

Irregular verbs: are pairs of words retrieved from the mental dictionary.