Words and Rules 2025

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The document discusses the psychological reality of language rules, particularly focusing on the acquisition of past tense forms in English. It contrasts different theories regarding how children learn to form past tenses, highlighting debates between rule-based approaches and associative memory models. The document presents evidence suggesting that children benefit from exposure to irregular verbs that share similar patterns, indicating that they may unconsciously abstract rules for irregular verbs just as they do for regular ones. Additionally, it introduces the Tolerance Principle, which posits that children assess whether to store a rule or individual exceptions based on the frequency of exceptions encountered.

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What is the synopsis of words and rules?

Main ideas. 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.

What rules govern the meaning of words and how to interpret them?

A minimum free form is a word. A word is thus a form which may be uttered alone (with meaning) but cannot be analyzed into parts that may (all of them) be uttered alone (with meaning). ( Bloomfield 1926, 156)

What is Steven Pinkers theory?

Pinker argues that all languages are built on the same universal grammar and that the language mechanism is built into the human brain; thus the basic structures of language are a part of our biological inheritance.

What is the words and rules theory?

The Words-and-Rules theory (WR) posits that different mental processes underlie regular and irregular past tense formation: regular forms are rule-generated (add -ed), whereas irregular forms are retrieved from memory.

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