Words and Rules

”[An] excellent work of popular science.“–Thomas Nagel, New Republic“MIT linguist Pinker builds on his previous successes (How the Mind Works; The Language Instinct) with another book explaining how we learn and deploy word, phrase and utterance… The result, with its crisp prose and neat analogies, makes required reading for anyone interested in cognition and language.”–Publishers Weekly“the book provides a scholarly, persuasive, enjoyable, and eminently readable account of important language phenomena.”–Nature“A fascinating voyage of discovery.”–Sunday Telegraph“An intellectual joyride.”–Globe and Mail“Compelling and revelatory.”–Guardian“Not only does Pinker breathe life into the topic, he makes the reading breathtakingly exciting.”–Montreal Gazette

Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, studied experimental psychology at McGill University and Harvard University. He is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker conducts research on languages and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of eight books, including The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and most recently The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011).