As part of the Ragged Library, Dr Sarah Anderson, Project Officer at the Beltane Public Engagement Network suggested ‘Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language’ by Steven Pinker…

My book would be Stephen Pinker’s ‘Words and Rules’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_and_Rules. I read this book as a final-year undergraduate student and it made the dry academic work I was doing suddenly make sense.
Pinker takes something most people (including me) would find incredibly boring – regular and irregular verbs – and uses them as evidence for how children learn language. The book explains why children often get things ‘wrong’, and why there is no point correcting them – one for all the pushy parents out there! Reading Pinker’s book was one of the main reasons I chose to do a PhD.