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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... children learn to talk from role models and caregivers . They know that grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured in the ... child spontaneously , without conscious effort or formal instruction , is deployed without awareness of its ...
... children or something that must be elaborated in school - as Oscar Wilde said , " Education is an admirable thing , but ... child has an instinctive tendency to brew , bake , or write . Moreover , no philologist now supposes that any lan ...
... children pick up their mother tongue by imitating their moth- ers , but when a child says Don't giggle me ! or We holded the baby rab- bits , it cannot be an act of imitation . I want to debauch your mind with learning , to make these ...
... child ] . Nevertheless individuals in a speech com- munity have developed essentially the same language . This fact can be explained only on the assumption that these individuals employ highly restrictive principles that guide the ...
... children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue . That happened , Bickerton has argued , when children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in ...
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 |