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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... suffixes , two moods , and fourteen tenses ; the verb agrees with its subject , its object , and its benefactive nouns , each of which comes in sixteen genders . ( In case you are wondering , these " genders " do not pertain to things ...
... suffixes , no tense or other temporal and logical markers , no structure more complex than a simple clause , and no consistent way to indicate who did what to whom . But the children who had grown up in Hawaii beginning in the 1890s and ...
... suffixes in established languages arose . For example , the English past - tense end- ing -ed may have evolved from the verb do : He hammered was origi- nally something like He hammer - did . Indeed , creoles are bona fide languages ...
... suffix ( in ASL , raised eyebrows and a lifted chin ) to indicate that it is the topic of the sentence . The English sentence Elvis I really like is a rough equivalent . But Simon's parents rarely used this construction and mangled it ...
... suffix -s as in He walks . Agreement is an important process in many languages , but in modern English it is superfluous , a remnant of a richer system that flourished in Old English . If it were to disappear entirely , we would not ...
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 |