The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates LanguageHarper Collins, 2010 M12 14 - 576 pages "A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published. |
From inside the book
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... Chomsky as Shake- speare is to Spenser . " -The Economist " [ A ] marvelously readable book about language , written by a real expert . Steven Pinker tackles with wit and erudition the kinds of question every- one asks .... [ He ] ...
... Chomsky , the linguist who first unmasked the intricacy of the system and perhaps the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive sci- ence . In the 1950s the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism ...
... Chomsky called atten- tion to two fundamental facts about language . First , virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand - new combina- tion of words , appearing for the first time in the history of the uni ...
... Chomsky and other linguists developed theories of the mental grammars underlying people's knowledge of particular languages and of the Universal Grammar underlying the particular grammars . Early on , Chomsky's work encouraged other ...
... Chomsky attacks what is still one of the foundations of twentieth- century intellectual life - the " Standard Social Science Model , ” according to which the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture . But it is also because no ...
Contents
1 | |
12 | |
44 | |
How Language Works | 74 |
Words Words Words | 119 |
The Sounds of Silence | 153 |
Talking Heads | 190 |
The Tower of Babel | 231 |
Language Organs and Grammar Genes | 302 |
The Big Bang | 340 |
The Language Mavens | 382 |
Mind Design | 419 |
Notes | 449 |
References | 469 |
Glossary | 503 |
Index | 517 |