The Language Instinct

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, 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 linguistics and cognitive science 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. Pinker's revolutionary book challenges our most basic assumptions about what language is and where it comes from: Language Acquisition: Discover why every three-year-old is a grammatical genius who learns their native tongue not through teaching, but through a powerful instinct. The Rules of Language: An accessible explanation of how grammar works, revealing the elegant, tree-like structures that allow us to generate infinite sentences from a finite set of words. Language and the Brain: A tour of the cognitive science and neurolinguistics behind our abilities, exploring the brain regions that compute language and what happens when they go wrong. The Evolution of Language: A compelling argument for why language is not a cultural invention but a biological adaptation, a human instinct honed by natural selection over millennia.