Steven Pinker: preference

Transcript context

…Steven Pinker has stridden into the room, and requires no further introduction. [laughter] I’ve looked at a lot of Steven’s work again lately, and I’d like to start with your early work on irregular verbs. It’s striking to me how much in this work you think like an economist. Some verbs are regular — you conjugate them with an -ed — others are irregular. You don’t say getted. You say got. How computationally efficient is that process? [laughs] I think it taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible. Why would I spend a good chunk of my career studying the minutiae of irregular verbs? I do love language. I love linguistic detail for its own sake, but I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organization. Why do we have 165 or so quirky exceptions like stride, strode; come, came; sing, sang; go, went; and so on? It just seems that there could be no rhyme or reason behind hit. I think it’s just a consequence of the fact that we memorize words, and that’s one of the two mechanisms behind language. We store by brute force, rote memory, arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning. The word duck doesn’t look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because we and everyone in this room has memorized a pairing between that sound and that meaning. We don’t just blurt out words but we also combine them into phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to predict theme or compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts and the way that they are arranged. Those are the two mechanisms that make language possible. But there are some kinds of meanings where they can compete over which system expresses a particular concept. In the case of regularity or irregularity, we have two different ways of conveying the concept “an action that took place in the past,” or in the case of plurals like mouse, mice and rat, rats, two ways of talking about more than one thing. We can memorize a more or less independent word to convey the idea like struck or sang, or we can apply an algorithm to say something in the past tense — add -ed to the end — and then we get walk, walked. Because of the peculiarities of the history of a language, you can have that labor divided between the rule system — the algorithmic system — and the memory system, and it’s the tension between those two systems that gives rise to a lot of the quirkiness of language, including English irregular verbs. When you did this — this was one of the first things to make you famous — did you know in the back of your mind this was a kind of Hayekian argument? Because it seems to me the common verbs, that we use a lot, those go irregular, and it’s easy to remember them because you use them all the time. But the regular verbs are ones that you don’t use so often and thus, again, you’re economizing on information in this decentralized way.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.