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The Language Instinct (Popular Penguin)Stock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionSteven Pinker's The Language Instinctpropelled him to worldwide fame in 1994. His groundbreaking book's premise - that language is instinctual rather than acquired - so shook the foundations of biological science that the reverberations are still being felt today. Reviews“Is thought dependent on words? Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain - a language of thought, or 'mentalese' - and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener? No question could be more central to understanding the language instinct.'…Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His answer is unequivocal: 'mentalese'. Language, he says, does not shape thought: thought shapes language. Fundamentally, human minds work in the same way, regardless of the language we happen to speak; and this working is innate - we cannot help but learn to talk.” |