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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... common sense over some of the nonsense that has domi- nated psychology and linguistics for much of this century . . . . A book about language had better be well written , and Mr. Pinker's book is superbly so . Rarely can such a rich ...
... language , came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened . A common language connects the members of a com- munity into an information - sharing network with formidable collec- 2 The Language Instinct.
... common opinions is wrong ! And they are all wrong for a single reason . Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works . Instead , it is a distinct piece of the ...
... common man can only say , “ Of course we smile , of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd , of course we love the maiden , that beautiful soul clad in that per- fect form , so palpably and flagrantly made for all ...
... common to the 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 ...
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 |