I'm going to try to keep track of all the books I read this year, so here's the first one. Words and Rules by Steven Pinker. I've read all his other books since The Language Instinct, but this one I left aside for a while as it seems to be his least accessible one.
Well perhaps I wouldn't recommend this to someone who was starting out with Pinker but I found it very enjoyable and illuminating nonetheless. There are countless interesting examples of odd quirks in the English language and I found his central argument that language is a system implemented in the brain as a collection of arbitrary sounds associated with meanings (words) coupled with the combinatorial power of a few simple rules (grammar) to be quite convincing. Research has revealed that these functions are performed in different parts of the brain, so that people with Alzheimer's tend to have damage in a certain location that causes difficulty with words, whereas Parkinson's sufferers have trouble with grammar.
Brimming with great ideas, reading this you really feel you are in the hands of the world's foremost expert in linguistics.
