Chapter 5: Words, Words, Words Summary and Analysis

Chapter 5: Words, Words, Words

"Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?" Chap. 5, p. 126

Pinker states that the world of words is as equally fascinating as the world of syntax and that memorizing certain words takes a special skill.

People are taught to form certain tasks in their minds when it comes to words and syntax. When tested it is shown that adults have a much more difficult time using unfamiliar words when they try to decide how to add suffixes. This leads Pinker into discussing morphology - the morphing of words to fit into particular sentence structure or syntax as well as creating compound words.

Morphology is a fascinating system with a clever...