The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language - Couverture souple

Pinker, Steven

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0140175296 ISBN 13 : 9780140175295

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind is a groundbreaking study of language's origins as an evolutionary adaptation. How do we 'know' how to speak? In his landmark book Stephen Pinker shows how language is part of our genetic inheritance rather than a cultural creation. From the DNA that builds our brains to the pontification of newspaper columnists, Pinker destroys the myths about language - that children learn to talk by copying their parents, that grammatical standards are in decline, that English defies logic - revealing the innate human instinct to communicate that we are all born with. 'Reading Steven Pinker's book is one of the biggest favours I've ever done my brain ... highly accessible to the general reader yet at the same time seminal for professionals ... exhilaratingly brilliant'
  Richard Dawkins 'An extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written'
  Noam Chomsky 'Brilliant ... Pinker describes every aspect of language, from the resolution of ambiguity to the way speech evolved ... he expounds difficult ideas with clarity, wit and polish'
  Observer 'Dazzling ... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct, as innate to us as language is to geese ... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations'
  Independent Steven Pinker is a best-selling author and Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. Pinker has been awarded research prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, graduate and undergraduate teaching prizes from MIT, and book prizes from the American Psychological Association, the Linguistics Society of America and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Language Instinct.

Quatrième de couverture

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140175296
• ISBN 13: 9780140175295
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 496