The Language Instinct
How The Mind Creates Language
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5,0 • 1 valutazione
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- 11,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
"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 linguistics and cognitive science 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.
Pinker's revolutionary book challenges our most basic assumptions about what language is and where it comes from:
Language Acquisition: Discover why every three-year-old is a grammatical genius who learns their native tongue not through teaching, but through a powerful instinct.The Rules of Language: An accessible explanation of how grammar works, revealing the elegant, tree-like structures that allow us to generate infinite sentences from a finite set of words.Language and the Brain: A tour of the cognitive science and neurolinguistics behind our abilities, exploring the brain regions that compute language and what happens when they go wrong.The Evolution of Language: A compelling argument for why language is not a cultural invention but a biological adaptation, a human instinct honed by natural selection over millennia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A three-year-old toddler is ``a grammatical genius''--master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language. To Pinker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psycholinguist, the explanation for this miracle is that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly ``hard-wired'' into the brain and partly learned. In this exciting synthesis--an entertaining, totally accessible study that will regale language lovers and challenge professionals in many disciplines--Pinker builds a bridge between ``innatists'' like MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who hold that infants are biologically programmed for language, and ``social interactionists'' who contend that they acquire it largely from the environment. If Pinker is right, the origins of language go much further back than 30,000 years ago (the date most commonly given in textbooks)--perhaps to Homo habilis , who lived 2.5 million years ago, or even eons earlier. Peppered with mind-stretching language exercises, the narrative first unravels how babies learn to talk and how people make sense of speech. Professor and co-director of MIT's Center for Cognitive Science, Pinker demolishes linguistic determinism, which holds that differences among languages cause marked differences in the thoughts of their speakers. He then follows neurolinguists in their quest for language centers in the brain and for genes that might help build brain circuits controlling grammar and speech. Pinker also argues that claims for chimpanzees' acquisition of language (via symbols or American Sign Language) are vastly exaggerated and rest on skimpy data. Finally, he takes delightful swipes at ``language mavens'' like William Safire and Richard Lederer, accusing them of rigidity and of grossly underestimating the average person's language skills. Pinker's book is a beautiful hymn to the infinite creative potential of language. Newbridge Book Clubs main selection; BOMC and QPB alternates.
