About this title: New York Times"-bestselling author Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how words explain human nature.
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Description: New. 0143142585 SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION. Great Book at a Great Value! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Allen Lane
Date Published: 27/09/2007
ISBN-13:9780713997415ISBN:0713997419
Description: Used-Good. Book in good or better condition. Dispatched same day from warehouse. Please email with any questions for quick response. read more
Description: New. 0670063274 SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION. Great Book at a Great Value! read more
"A little heavy here, Steven. This book strikes me as a work that has been written after the author attained a substantial level of wealth and income. Why? Because people who are very successful in one field (here, linguistics) usually hold inflated opinions of their expertise on other matters as well.
The biggest flaw with this book is Pinker's lack of awareness of alternative approaches to the matters he discusses.
As I have been reading this book, I have repeatedly been startled by passages that show a striking ignorance of topics and information that other academic disciplines cover.
This intellectual vice, which really is just arrogance, can be especially extreme in students or teachers associated with Harvard University. Pinker teaches there.
It's as if Pinker has forgotten, or never learned, important information from fields including history, the other social sciences and the humanities.
Apart from that, the book outlines a widely respected approach to linguistics. It does demand a fierce level of attention.
Unfortunately, after absorbing several chapters, I reached a personal watershed regarding linguistics in general by asking myself the question: If linguistics didn't exist, would it be necessary to invent it?
So far, my answer to that question is an emphatic "no."
This book does not provide a convincing reason that the amount of wealth and status accorded to the community of linguistics scholars is a necessary or attractive adornment to our society.
Linguistics does provide comfortable incomes and prestigious careers to its practitioners. This book does not prove that linguistics has generated anything beyond those creature comforts, except for the sort of recreation available from, say, sudoku or chess. Rather, it provides evidence that linguistics departments should be shuttered and that linguistics students should be redirected to pursuits that are useful or aesthetically pleasing or both.
As for linguistics professors, they could be assigned to useful work in, say, solid waste disposal, the construction industry, migrant vegetable and fruit picking, the embalming and mortuary industries, telemarketing, restaurant work, the agriculture, mining or forestry sectors, abbatoir sanitation or as cashiers in our nation's retail stores."
"One of the best books I've read in 2009. I read this book after downloading the first chapter onto my Kindle. It was a very good chapter. It was also the first non-fiction book I read on my Kindle. The next two or three chapters was much harder to get through as it was survey of the different language assimilation theories and why they failed to answer observations Steven Pinker and other see in the real world. I did find several chapters exceptionally interesting: The Metaphor Metaphor - how we build metaphors on top of each other to understand increasing complex concepts, What's in a Name - explains the waxing and waning of popularity of names we give to our children, and The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television - what cursing is and why we need it and use it, The Games People Play - why we don't always say what we want or desire to say and how our language reflects, by the absents of words, the subjects we have a hard time discussing directly. This book should be read by anyone who wants to understand the nature of humans and how it is reflected in the languages we create and use."
"Pinker is a true joy to read, and this book may be his best yet. He examines aspects of human language--including politeness, profanity, metaphor, and the details of word meanings--and shows how they reveal deep structure and knowledge about how our minds conceptualize the world and deal with problem solving and social interactions. As always, Pinker's writing is both smart and witty--the book is packed with scientific findings and often quite technical (though never hard to follow), and I learned a ton (despite having an advanced degree in this field). At the same time, his use of jokes and pop culture references to illustrate his points had me laughing out loud on numerous occasions. All in all, even at 400+ pages, I was left wanting more. Highly recommended for anyone interested in better understanding how we humans work--or for those just in search of a great read that also makes you smarter!"
"This is a fast read book. Though I don't like Pinker's allegiance to Chomsky, I think he's great for summing up the bunches of different theories and even better at describing the problems in linguistics that people are trying to understand--excellent examples! And he has an entertaining narrative voice. My only beef was that after he spent time talking about fallacious arguments and the people who use them, he tended to attack "radical" or "extreme" versions of theories, thereby leading the reader to think (not always) that the whole of those particular fields were stupid. And then later, appeals to different parts of said theories to back up what he, himself, is arguing. BUT, having said that, it was a fun read and,again, a great (re-)introduction to conceptual metaphor theory and its competition to explain everyday things, like why is it we tend to use a swear word after hitting our thumbs with a hammer? And though I don't necessarily buy into every explanation, they are still worthwhile to consider because they, again, highlight sets of problems that linguists face when trying to understand why we do the things we do with language."
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