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A cogently presented argument for a language instinct. I hold a Ph.D., not in linguistics, but in criminal justice decision makiing, and I am convinced that before Edward O. Wilson's attempt to bring order to the psychosocial sciences with biological theory, these sciences were in the thrall of "rolethink" and choking on a plethora of "theories" but not one -- not one -- that could meet the standards of even Darwin's original theory. Alice still speaks to them: "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words [the reader may substitute 'theories'] mean so many different things." With so many "theores" to explain one simple event, no wonder psychosocial scientists turned to factor analysis and post hoc theorizing. And you don't discover findings like those presented by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson in The Truth about Cinderella with Rolethink. In The Language Instinct, Pinker may not have captured the one exact formula that the brain uses to generate all languages, but he seems to me to be on the right track. Critics must ask, Is there a better explanation? Amazingly, he manages to present what to most people would be a difficult and boring subject in a lively manner that keeps a reader smiling and reading. His later book, How the MInd Works, presents a broader canvas for his views. He must have been one heck of a teacher.
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Steven Pinker, formerly of MIT but finally moved to Harvard's psychology department where he is more appreciated, is perhaps within a select group addressing supper-complex language issues. The past 20 years have witnessed more scientific knowledge about our speech then in previous 13,000 years, leaving with more and bet trot question than ever but almost no answers, a true feature go scientific advancement. The more we know how limited are knowledge, the greater our understanding grows, Pinker is great example of knowledgeable scientist who has increasing fewer answers.
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I'm a fan of Pinker's work, and this is no exception. The reading is dense, and requires time and thoughtfulness to process all of the information he presents. There is an extensive reference list that is worth delving into to gain greater perspective on language development. This should be required reading for all primary-level educators.
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I bought this book because I have already read other Pinker's books. He is a pretty good researcher in Language studies with excellent theoretical sources. I recommend The Language Instinc: How The Mind Creates Languages (paperback) to anyone who works with languages.
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61 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Addressing as it does issues of cognition, language usage and acquisition, evolutionary biology and innate versus learned behavior, this work is relevant to many of the great intellectual debates of our time. It is very readable for the most part, although if some of the topics are new to you then you will find a few sections rather heavy going. More illustrations would have helped here. There are syntax structure diagrams and one very grudging, cursory sketch of the language centers of the brain, but many sections cry out for a diagram among all the verbiage.
Pinker's lively, humorous style is often commented on but I sometimes found it wearing. He will illustrate a point with an amusing newspaper cutting, then list a few more, then add "I could not resist some more..." and so on. I sometimes wished he would just get on with it.
A major problem with his nativist approach, which other reviewers have commented on, is that many examples he lists of usages that English speakers would never employ are nothing of the kind. Most of them are conceivable and since the first publication of this book, linguists have been busy recording them in the field. The thesis also becomes somewhat unraveled in the penultimate chapter, where he argues that 'you and I' and 'you and me' are equally correct in all circumstances, because 'the pronoun is free to have any case it wants'. But if this is so then what has become of the innate awareness of correct usage that the whole theory is about? If 'between you and I' sounds instinctively wrong to me and 'between you and me' sounds instinctively wrong to someone else, does that mean one of us has a mutant grammar gene? I doubt it.
Covers the topics that I was interested in reading about linguistic. This book appears to be a introdutory work to the topics , there are others books of the same author , that develop the topics more deeply.
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This item: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
