Little Shop of Knowledge

The book begins by talking about the infinite library, which is language. (In reality it's not infinite, it's an extremely high number but it's not infinite per se). Pinker breaks down language into words and rules, and within these he analyzes the matter of irregular verbs. He explains how this may seem like the kind of approach where by knowing too much of anything you end up knowing nothing of everything.Of words he says that they are the memorization of a specific sound and meaning.  Rules on the other hand are used in order to arrange these words into meaningful combinations. Of rules he mentions 3 basic schemes: 1) Rules are productive. 2) Symbols contained by the rules are abstract. 3) Rules are combinatorial. In his other chapters Pinker gets into HOW humans attain language and where does it come from. This explaing why irregular verbs are so essential, because regular verbs have certain rules that apply almost instinctively. Take for example the drawing above, it was a study performed on children to analyze the nature of grammatical rules. The term "wug" was coined especifically for this purpose so it was impossible for these children to hear it elsewhere beforehand, yet all of them responded with "wugs" to dpeak of the plural of this funny looking creature. Words and rules in the end is not only about language but an inquiry into how the human mind works. It's interesting because no one is "predisposed" to learn A CERTAIN language, rather people have these "programming" in order to learn the language they're exposed to.