User:JBalcita/Words and Rules

Link to Other Pinker Book Wiki Page
The Blank Slate This may be a helpful reference to the structure of our own page


 * Reception heading? (positive and negative)
 * Should we describe the table of contents of book?
 * summarize
 * past tense debate and alternative positions; connectivist, all rules...

Additions/Revisions

 * revise lead section to have "Words and Rules" refer to a general theory Pinker has developed that was introduced/formalized in his book of the same title
 * Words and Rules is a theory that has been developed by Steven Pinker. It has been popularly contextualized within the so-called "Past-Tense Debate," which was sparked by Rumelhart and McClelland's 1986 connectionist model on the production of regular and irregular verbs.  Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language  It also shares the titles of Pinker's popular 1999 popular linguistics book and essay by Steven Pinker about regular and irregular verbs . In essence, the Words and Rules theory states that past-tense forms of verbs arise from both declarative memory (as words) and a procedural system (from rules).
 * expound general ideas already mentioned in the article (e.g. overgeneralization, double dissociation, etc.)
 * In his book, Pinker "tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable." His analysis reflects his view that language and many other aspects of human nature are innate evolutionary-psychological adaptations. Most of the book examines studies conducted on the form and frequency of grammatical errors (such as overgeneralization in past-tense formation) in English (and to a lesser extent in German) as well as the speech of brain-damaged persons with selective aphasia. The title, Words and Rules, refers to a model Pinker believes best represents how words are represented in the mind. He writes that words are either stored directly with their associated meanings in the lexicon (or a "mental dictionary") or are constructed using morphological rules. Leak and rose, for example, would be stored as mental dictionary entries, but the words  leaking  leaked and roses do not need to be memorized separately, as they can be easily constructed by applying "rules" that add the appropriate suffixes (i.e. "adding '-ed'" to form the past-tense form and adding "adding '-s'" to form the plural form). In analyzing the English errors children make (such as the over-application of morphological rules to create words like mouses and bringed), Pinker concludes that irregular forms verbs are not remembered in terms of the supposed rules that produce them (such as a rule that would produce sleep/slept, weep/wept, keep/kept, etc.), but instead are memorized separately directly, while the rule for forming regular past-tense forms (i.e. "adding '-ed') applies by default.
 * The Words and Rules model contradicts previous orthodox Chomskyan ideas (both connectionist and orthodox Chomskyan) hypothesizing that several irregular past tense forms arise from are the result of rules applied to verbs with based on phonological similarities (as seen with the example of sleep, weep, and keep above). In particular, he notes discrepancies that would arise, as in the verb steep and its past-tense form steeped as opposed to steep/stept. Pinker accepts a weak form of the notion of pattern associators from the connectionist model, which to explain states that the origin of the a small number of recent irregular verbs that obtain ed their past tense s forms due to associations between the phonological features of verbs and those of their irregular past-tense forms of surface similarity to other already-irregular verbs . For example, Pinker found that some adults and children will form the past-tense form splung from the novel verb splung in line with the pattern seen in fling/flung and cling/clung. However, he also shows research showing these sorts of generalizations to be exceedingly rare in comparison to the over-application of the regular past-tense rule (i.e. "adding '-ed'") to these verbs words with irregular past tenses . He additionally points out that connectionist models tend to produce odd past-tense forms to verbs that otherwise have regular forms (e.g. membled for mail). His research also examines past-tense formation among German speakers, further supporting his conclusion.  "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.

"The past and future of the past tense" by Steven Pinker and Michael T. Ullman

 * Generalization to unusual novel words
 * does not depend on frequency of forms
 * over-regularization can occur regardless of proportion of regular to irregular forms in a child's lexicon
 * German children overuse a plural form that is low in frequency (?)
 * does not depend on phonology
 * Hebrew has regular and irregular plurals of nouns that are phonologically similar
 * Systematic regularization
 * output also depends on context (not just sound) - ex. lowlifes vs. lowlives* to pluralize lowlife
 * differing semantic meanings of words with exocentric structures cannot attribute to regularization
 * regularization does not occur to avoid ambiguity
 * "L2" languages acting similar to exocentric words - plugging the "data pathway" to L2 lexicon?
 * Neuropsychological dissociations
 * anomia: impairment in word finding
 * agrammatism: impairment of producing fluent grammatical sequences