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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 extinctions, 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 safeguarding the language
but 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.
Stephen Pinker is professor and director
of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. His research in visual cognition
and in child language acquisition earned him the Distinguished
Early Career Award and the McCandless Young Developmental
Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association,
and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy
of Sciences. He has also won a teaching prize from MIT,
and in 1986 was featured in "The Esquire Register"
of outstanding men and women under forty. He lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
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