I recently finished Steven Pinker's new book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. The reviews said that the book is readable and even entertaining, and I found that to be true. However, I must confess to continually asking myself what the book is about. Each time I asked the question, I would figure out what the book is about, and using that understanding as a temporary anchor, continue reading. I'm not sure why I had so much trouble. Perhaps I didn't understand the significance of the main issues being discussed or why it was taking almost three hundred pages to deal with what seemed like limited issues, which seemed to be whether irregular verbs exist as words in a person's lexicon or are produced by the operation of rules and whether rules are digital or based on a person's prediction of statistical probability. (Pinker says irregulars are words in the lexicon and rules are digital.) Even with all this trouble, however, I learned a great deal about linguistics along the way. An example is his list of processes involved in the rise of new irregular and regular forms of verbs on p. 230. (There are 12 processes in all.) I also found his diagram of the components of language (p. 23) to be useful. The components, according to the diagram, are lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. This wasn't new to me, of course, but it did remind me that it's impossible to isolate one component, syntax, as we seem to be trying to do in ATEG. The operations of syntax depend on the operations of the other components. Surely this fact is yet another reason that teaching and learning about syntax is so difficult. Has anyone else read this book? If so, what did you think? Bill William J. McCleary 3247 Bronson Hill Road Livonia, NY 14487 716-346-6859