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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... speaking a single 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.
... speak , and understand language . For the first time in history , there is something to write about it . Some thirty - five years ago a new science was born . Now called " cognitive science , " it combines tools from psychology ...
... speak , as we see in the babble of our young chil- dren ; while no child has an instinctive tendency to brew , bake , or write . Moreover , no philologist now supposes that any lan- guage has been deliberately invented ; it has been ...
... speak a simpler or coarser language . This is a pernicious illusion arising from the effortlessness of conversation . Ordinary speech , like color vision or walking , is a paradigm of engi- neering excellence - a technology that works ...
... speaking quite differ- ently . Here are some sentences from the language they invented , Hawaiian Creole . The first two are from a Japanese papaya grower born in Maui ; the next two , from a Japanese / Hawaiian ex - plantation laborer ...
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 |