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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... grammars of all languages , a Universal Grammar , that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents . Chomsky put it as follows : It is a curious fact about the intellectual history of the past few ...
... Universal Grammar underlying the particular grammars . Early on , Chomsky's work encouraged other scientists , among them Eric Lenneberg , George Miller , Roger Brown , Morris Halle , and Alvin Liberman , to open up whole new areas of ...
... universal is innate . Just as travelers in previous decades never encountered a tribe without a language , nowadays ... grammar would simply reflect the universal exigencies of human experience and the universal limitations on human ...
... grammar . The crucial intervening steps come from my own professional specialty , the study of language development in children . The crux of the argu- ment is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it ...
... grammar but , according to Chomsky's theory , the Universal Gram- mar that governs all naturally acquired human languages ( later in this chapter we will see why ) . Simon's parents had also failed to grasp the verb inflection system of ...
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 |