The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Steven Pinker  
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
2000-09-01  
ISBN: 0061336467  
576 pages

In this classic, 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.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

            "A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book."
            —Michael Coe, New York Times Book Review

Everyone has questions about language. Some are from everydayexperience: Why do immigrants struggle with a new language, only tohave their fluent children ridicule their grammatical errors? Why can'tcomputers converse with us? Why is the hockey team in  Toronto calledthe 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 haveevolved? Is language  deteriorating?

Today laypeople can chitchat about black holes and dinosaur  extinctions,but their curiosity about  their own speech has been  left unsatisfied—untilnow. In The Language Instinct, Steven  Pinker, one of the world's leadingscientists of language and the mind, lucidly explains everything you alwayswanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how itchanges, how the brain computes it, how it evolved.

But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. With wit, erudition, and deftuse of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vastknowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a humaninstinct, wired into  our brains by evolution like web-spinning in spidersor sonar in bats.
The theory not only challenges convention wisdom about language itself(especially from the self-appointed "experts" who claim to  be safeguardingthe language but who understand it less well than a typical teenager). It ispart of a whole new vision of the human mind: not a general-purposecomputer, but a collection of instincts adapted to solving evolutionarilysignificant problems—the mind as a Swiss Army knife.

Entertaining, insightful, provocative, The Language Instinct will change theway you talk about talking and think about thinking.

qqblaire

谢谢 可惜我现在不能下载

shit

Pinker的the languae instinct.有些人很贱，假惺惺的传个上去共享还要限 制权限。