360 of 368 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Stuff, September 11, 2007
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?
(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,
(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.
Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it's a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is "the stuff of thought" with which Pinker's latest book is concerned, and this "stuff," as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of "the stuff of language," i.e., word categories and their syntactic habitats.
In the case of the two sentences above, we can see the human capacity to frame events in alternate ways through the dual function of verbs like "load." This verb draws attention to the hay and its movement in the first sentence, but to the transformation (a kind of metaphorical "movement") of the wagon in the second.
That children can learn the dual use of "load" and the dual conceptualizations that it entails, and distinguish this verb from others (like, say, toss) that don't work in both sentences (E.g., we don't say "Hal tossed the wagon with hay" even though we can say "Hal tossed the hay into the wagon") is evidence that distinct ways of thinking underlie our ability to master language. There are, after all, many thousands of verbs that fall into scores of different categories based on their applicability to different contexts like those involving Hal's hay in the cases above. Pinker believes that our ability to learn the subtle distinctions that control these and other word usages is evidence of their role as reflectors and enablers of the basic elements of human thought, elements like causality, animation, possession, time-as-space, and so on.
Pinker faces quite a challenge in bringing to life profound truths about human nature through a systematic, fine-grained analysis of mundane words like "drip" and "pour," but he succeeds admirably. This is a book that will amply reward a careful reading.
Of course some words are inherently more interesting than others, and for my money the chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" is by itself worth the price of the book. A number of features that help condemn a word to the realm of taboo are revealed here. For example, there are clear syntactic distinctions between the usually unprintable words for sex (which Pinker, I'm happy to report, audaciously prints) and their more presentable cousins, such as have sex, make love, sleep together, copulate, etc. I had never before noticed that the taboo and vulgar forms, which tend to specify physical motion, differ from the non-taboo terms in that they usually occur in a subject-verb-direct object construction (e.g., Austin shagged Vanessa). The more respectable terms lack a direct object and do not specify "a particular manner of motion or effect." Furthermore, they are semantically symmetrical, so that if Austin had sex with Vanessa, Vanessa also had sex with Austin. More fundamentally Pinker ties the cathartic effect of some swearing with "the Rage circuit, which [is]... connected with negative emotion." The Rage circuit, as part of the limbic system, is found in other animals and is associated with "a reflex in which a suddenly wounded or confined animal would erupt in a furious struggle to startle, injure and escape from a predator, often accompanied by a bloodcurdling yowl."
This is rich stuff, the drawing of a neat connection between a specific category of words and an emotional pattern linked to specific parts of the brain. This chapter also helps make sense of Tourette's syndrome and otherwise identifies swearing as "a coherent neurobiological phenomenon." Other chapters are similarly rewarding. Pinker's analysis of metaphors both expands on, and, to an extent, revises the classic works in this field by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others.
I have some quibbles with parts of Pinker's overall model, but this is to be expected with a work so ambitious and wide-ranging. I am surprised, for example, that Pinker doesn't mention the extensive work on cognitive prototypes by such authors as Brent Berlin and Eleanor Rosch since their research seems to overlap with his.
Another point: His arguments against connectionist models of language and thought I found to be not quite convincing. Here Pinker is arguing for a genetically-based set of neural patterns to explain the complexities of language, where connectionism points to a more flexible, post-natal learning system. Pinker demonstrates that connectionism is probably not adequate to explain language learning if one assumes (as he apparently does) that learning after puberty is just as permanent as that which is learned in childhood. But such an assumption is unwarranted, and if childhood learning does have a special durability, his criticism of connectionism loses its punch.
Also, in discussing social change (part of his analysis of changing tastes in the naming of children), he cites data indicating that most disappearances such as the end of hat-wearing among men in the 1960s, were the natural outcome of a long and steadily declining trajectory for this fashion. However, there are so many distinctly abrupt social changes that can be identified in this era (including such linguistic ones as the disappearance of the basic slang term "swell" and its replacement by "cool") that this argument for gradual social change leaves me skeptical.
Naturally these are the kinds of disputable points that a book like this is bound to stir up, and that's, of course, all to the good. All in all, Pinker has succeeded, once again, in writing a book which, while effectively tackling a very knotty set of issues, manages to be both accessible and engaging. Five stars.
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114 of 121 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best writer on the subject of language, September 14, 2007
For the verbivore, no one sets out a feast like Steven Pinker. For my money, The Language Instinct is still the best, most comprehensive, and most entertaining introduction to linguistics ever composed, and I have been waiting for more than 10 years for this book (Words and Rules was also a great book, but a little technical for my taste; I am more drawn to semantics than grammar).
The Stuff of Thought can be a little technical as well. After an introduction in the most appealing Pinker style, chapters 2 and 3, on the ways verbs imply metaphorical categories and the reasons competing language theories are wrong, are both persuasive and engaging, but only if you think about them really, really hard. I remember feeling the same way about the sentence trees and bushes early on in The Language Instinct. But the rewards for the persevering reader comes later. Should you find yourself bogging down, skip to the chapter The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, which treats the subject of George Carlin's famous monologue in a manner that is more comprehensive and penetrating (sorry), but at times equally hilarious. That should provide the fuel to travel the rest of his landscape.
The subject of this book is incredibly important and it represents the culmination of a number of themes. Pinker himself says that it completes two parallel trilogies of books he has been writing for the past ten years, and I also read this as the fulfillment of Lakoff and Johnson's brilliant 1980 book "Metaphors We Live By," which lists the fundamental ways our physical reality structures our mental constructs, as revealed by pervasive metaphors. Pinker argues convincingly that Lakoff's later work pushes the metaphorical envelope too far, but he agrees that metaphor provides key insights into thoughts and understanding. He explores the theme of how language reveals and subtly shapes the ways the human mind makes sense of the world in a comprehensive, thoughtful, and compelling manner, carrying Lakoff's initial premise to a compelling, comprehensive theory of the function of metaphor in language and thought.
The linguist S.I. Hiyakawa observed that the last thing fish would think to study would be water; as we increasingly live in a world where words impinge on our every moment of consciousness, unpacking language helps us all understand the way it reveals and shapes our mental worlds. It also helps us understand what is not up for debate, and one of Pinker's most compelling themes is the universal community of human minds revealed by language commonalities. Pinker's philosophy of language somehow makes me feel both that language reveals individual creative genius (often in unexpected speakers) and a central set of commonalities among all human minds.
As a final note, the beauty of Pinker's writing in itself is sufficient reason to read this book. As a language lover, I find it a discouraging irony that so many linguists are so poor at articulating their arguments and insights, and that so much written about language is difficult and boring to read. Pinker, while taking on complex, abstruce topics, writes with clarity, enthusiasm, and humor. Aside from Richard Lederer, he is the only linguist I know who makes me laugh regularly.
Basically,I feel about Steven Pinker approximately the way Wayne and Garth felt about Aerosmith, and I am certainly dancing happily to The Stuff of Thought. Rock on, Steve!
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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Language - a window to the way our minds work. Good and clear insights from Pinker., November 18, 2007
Once Steven Pinker gets over his difficult first chapter (he's hunting around trying to find first gear) this book really takes off. Pinker uses the way we structure our language, with all of its grammatical rules and foibles, as evidence of how our minds work. Thus if we accept that children don't learn grammar by rote memory, but more through induction and the creation of general rules, then we can see that the way these rules are framed are a reflection of the way we think.
Pinker cites hundreds of references, dozens of fascinating experiments, and calls on - often with great wit and brio - many entertaining examples of our language and what it really says about us. A whole chapter on "the seven words you can't use on television" shows the almost magical qualities we attach to words.
For me the most fascinating work in this book focuses on the way we speak indirectly to each other, often alluding to what we mean to say. Why say: "It would be awesome if you would pass the ketchup," when we really mean "Pass the ketchup." The answer lies in our complex social brain: and our desire to get on with others by removing the power implications of a direct order. Pinker takes his examples much deeper than this.
This is wonderful reading for people who are either fascinated by the human mind, or fascinated by our living language - or both. Five stars.
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