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How does language work? How do children
learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over
time, making Shakespearean English difficult for us and
Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Why do languages
have so many quirks and irregularities? Are they all fundamentally
alike? How are new words created? Where in the brain does
language reside?
In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker
answers these and many other questions. His new book shares
the wit and style of his classic, The Language Instinct,
but explores language in a completely different way. In
Words and Rules, Pinker explains the profound mysteries
of language by picking a deceptively single phenomenon and
examining it from every angle. The phenomenon -- regular
and irregular verbs -- connects an astonishing array of
topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages;
the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts
to simulate language using computer simulations of neural
networks; the illuminating errors of children as they begin
to speak; the nature of human concepts; the peculiarities
of the English language; major ideas in the history of Western
philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and
imaging the living brain.
Pinker makes sense of all of this with the
help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises
a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar
of creative rules. The idea extends beyond language and
offers insight into the very nature of the human mind.
This is a sparkling, eye-opening and utterly
original book by one of the world's leading cognitive scientists.
Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal,
studied experimental psychology at McGill University and
Harvard University. He is Professor of Psychology and Director
of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Pinker has studied many aspects
of language and visual cognition, with a focus on language
acquisition in children. A fellow of several scientific
societies, he has been awarded research prizes from the
National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological
Association, a teaching prize from MIT and book prizes from
the American Psychological Association, the Linguistics
Society of America and the Los Angeles Times. Steven
Pinker is the author of the landmark bestsellers, The
Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works
(1997) and is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines,
including Time, Slate and The New York
Times.
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