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He is also, you may know, a redoubtable philosopher, media critic, and political scientist in his spare time. If you care about language and the mind, you should read this book. Pinker's thesis is the absolute centrepoint of Chomsky's program: that language is an instinct. If you're having trouble swallowing that claim, you're not alone.
Many people choke on it. An instinct is something that takes birds south in the fall, makes frogs bloat-up their throats and croak love ballads in the spring, causes people to step on the gas at yellow lights. An instinct is unthinking and primitive. How could something as vast and tangled and quintessentially human as language be an instinct?
Easy, if you take 'instinct' with a grain of salt, if you take it to mean that people have an innate urge to communicate with each other symbolically and to acquire the main human tool for doing so, language. The trouble is, Pinker doesn't want you to take his title with a grain of salt. Then: "people know how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs".
Then: that children achieve language "not because they are taught, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can't help it. There are many reasons not to. For one, children who have no exposure to language don't acquire it. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language.
But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
What is it about the human mind that accounts for the fact that we can speak and understand a language? And what does this tell us about the rest of human abilities? Recent dramatic discoveries in linguistics and psychology provide intriguing answers to these age-old mysteries. In this fascinating book, Ray Jackendoff emphasizes the grammatical commonalities across languages, both spoken and signed, and discusses the implications for our understanding of language acquisition and loss.
Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism.
Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense. Seminar paper from the year in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1. This important debate which concerns linguistics until today will be the topic of the following work. The important question is, if a language instinct really exists and which evidence one can provide to assume that our language ability is inherited.
Until today, there is great discussion and speculation about innate language ideas and the most important proponent for them nowadays is Steven Pinker. To set his nativist ideas in an appropriate context, it is necessary to explain where the ideas of "nativism" and the opposite linguistic school "empiricism" come from and what characteristics they show.
This constructs a context and prepares a base for the focus on Pinker's book. The most important founder of today's nativist thoughts is certainly Noam Chomsky, whose ideas were the basis for Pinker's assumption of a language instinct. For this reason, I will present a short summary of Chomsky's ideas as the last aspect of the first chapter.
Pinker's arguments put forward in his work "The language instinct" will form the main part and second chapter of my work. I will present his definition of a language instinct and his given evidence for its existence. Because of the complexity of the pieces of evidence put forward in his whole work, I will pick up two of his most important aspects for innate language ideas: Pidgin and creoles and the case of the KE-Family.
Afterwards, I will focus on two of his critics, Geoffrey Samspon and Stefan Schaden, because they composed bo. How Language Began revolutionizes our understanding of the one tool that has allowed us to become the "lords of the planet. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers.
Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup.
Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60, generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue.
Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human. The Interactional Instinct explores the evolution of language from the theoretical view that language could have emerged without a biologically instantiated Universal Grammar.
In the first part of the book, the authors speculate that a hominid group with a lexicon of about words could combine these items to make larger meanings. Combinations that are successfully produced, comprehended, and learned become part of the language.
Any combination that is incompatible with human mental capacities is abandoned. The authors argue for the emergence of language structure through interaction constrained by human psychology and physiology. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.
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