24.2245, Books: Learnability And Cognition, New Edition: Pinker

Fri May 31 13:20:17 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2245. Fri May 31 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2245, Books: Learnability And Cognition, New Edition: Pinker

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Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 09:19:55
From: Anar Badalov [badalov at mit.edu]
Subject: Learnability And Cognition, New Edition: Pinker

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Title: Learnability And Cognition, New Edition 
Subtitle: The Acquisition of Argument Structure 
Publication Year: 2013 
Publisher: MIT Press
	   http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Book URL: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learnability-and-cognition-1 

Author: Steven Pinker

Paperback: ISBN:  9780262518406 Pages: 528 Price: U.S. $ 35.00

Abstract:

Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote
several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics
in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989,
brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue,
and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space,
time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was set by
the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly
subtle distinctions: pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water
sound natural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into the glass
sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected
for uttering odd sentences, and they don’t just parrot back the correct ones
they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of
how children acquire the meaning and uses of verbs, and explores that theory’s
implications for language, thought, and the relationship between them.

As Pinker writes in a new preface, “The Secret Life of Verbs,” the phenomena
and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions,
he notes, provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary
metaphor, scientific understanding, political discourse, and even the
conceptions of sexuality that go into obscenity.

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Language Acquisition

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64436

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