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"Everyone has questions about language. Some are from everyday experience: Why do immigrants struggle with a new language, only to have their fluent children ridicule their grammatical errors? Why can't computers converse with us? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs, not the Maple Leaves? Some are from popular science: Have scientists really reconstructed the first language spoken on earth? Are there genes for grammar? Can chimpanzees learn sign language? And some are from our deepest ponderings about the human condition: Does our language control our thoughts? How could language have evolved? Is language deteriorating?" "Today laypeople can chitchat about black holes and dinosaur extinictions, but their curiosity about their own speech has been left unsatisfied - until now. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading scientists of language and the 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, how it evolved." "But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats." "The theory not only challenges conventional wisdom about language itself (especially from the self-appointed "experts" who claim to be safe-guarding the language hut who understand it less well than a typical teenager). It is part of a whole new vision of the human mind: not a general-purpose computer, but a collection of instincts adapted to solving evolutionarily significant problems - the mind as a Swiss Army knife." "Entertaining, insightful, provocative, The Language Instinct will change the way you talk about talking and think about thinking."--BOOK JACKET.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Long Now Manual for Civilization, Biolinguistics, Language and languages, Psycholinguistcs, Philosophy, Instinct (Philosophy), Language disorders, Physiological aspects, Linguistics, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES, WORDS (LANGUAGE), Psycholinguistik, LANGUAGES, Verbal Behavior, Taalpsychologie, Langage et langues, Popular Works, Kognition, Biolinguistique, Denken, Language, Psycholinguistics, Sprache, Language Development, New York Times reviewed, Language acquisition, Psycholinguistique, Langage, Acquisition, Speech, Cognition, Human Development, P106 .p476 1995, 400Showing 6 featured editions. View all 18 editions?
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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
September 4, 2007, Harper Perennial Modern Classics
in English
0061336467 9780061336461
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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
September 4, 2007, Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Paperback
in English
0061336467 9780061336461
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3
The language instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
1995, HarperPerennial
in English
- 1st HarperPerennial ed.
0060976519 9780060976514
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The language instinct: the new science of language and mind
1994, Allen Lane
in English
0713990996 9780713990997
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5 |
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 447-472) and index.
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Work Description
From the Preface...
I have never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret.
For the language lover, I hope to show that there is a world of elegance and richness in quotidian speech that far outshines the local curiosities of etymologies, unusual words, and fine points of usage.
For the reader of popular science, I hope to explain what is behind the recent discoveries (or, in many cases, nondiscoveries) reported in the press: universal deep structures, brainy babies, grammar genes, artifically intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral children, paradoxical brain damage, identical twins separated at birth, color pictures of the thinking brain, and the search for the mother of all languages. I also hope to answer many natural questions about languages, like why there are so many of them, why they are so hard for adults to learn, and why no one seems to know the plural of Walkman.
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