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The Language Instinct

How the Mind Creates Language

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About this listen

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.

©2011 Steven Pinker (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc. Communication & Social Skills History & Philosophy Linguistics Personal Development Philosophy Science Social Sciences Words, Language & Grammar Witty Mathematics Human Brain Computer Science

Critic reviews

"Pinker writes with acid verve." ( Atlantic Monthly)
"An extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written." (Noam Chomsky)
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First science book I read years ago that fulfilled my hunger for more knowledge about language and set me on a journey of more discovery still sticks up and i will gladly return to it again and again.

Exceptional reasoning via metaphorical description

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didn't realize language had so much to it! understanding the similarly to creature development and Darwinism theory was good.

good

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A lucid and extremely clear account of the language instinct. Every chapter is brilliant and still extremely relevant, even 3 decades later. This version has a final section where Pinker comments on each chapter some 15 years later, with some additions and remarks about where things might have turned out differently.

The performance is also brilliant, but there are 3 or 4 hiccups in the file, where I was left with the impression that I might be missing a second or more.

Amazing book

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A brilliant book full of learning and erudition. Ad often with Pinker, some sections get a little involved particularly for an audio book but overall a masterful piece of work.

Endlessly fascinating

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I read a chapter of this book at university and remember really enjoying it. I think it was chapter 12: “The Language Mavens”. At the time I was interested in notions of correct grammar and standard English. I found it to be persuasive: that artificially imposed grammar rules (such as you shouldn’t split an infinitive or shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition) are unnecessary and meaningless. I enjoyed listening to that chapter again, but it’s quite different from the rest of the book, which, although written for a general audience, is still quite academic and thick in the weeds of linguistics. It was interesting but, to be honest, not much of it has stayed with me on the surface level of knowledge since I read the book. I’m not sure how much of it is original research by Steven Pinker, or whether he’s just synthesizing the research of others.

The Language Mavens

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