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The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language

The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language

List Price: $15.00
Your Price: $10.20
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Wonderful Book
Review: I have a ten year old daughter who is struggling to speak and so, when I saw an interview with Dr. Pinker on PBS, I was inspired to pick-up his book. It's been life-changing. It's easy to understand but by no means insultingly simple or, worse, incomplete. I've been able to help my daughter with the knowledge I've gained.

I've even been able to correspond with Dr. Pinker and he was charming and knowledgeable and recommended several wonderful and helpful people to us, without whom all would have been lost.

I'll continue to recommend this book to everyone, but especially to teachers, sign language interpreters and teachers & parents of the deaf.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This is wit?
Review: Perhaps it's a brilliant overview pushing speculation as fact, but I stopped reading after the introduction and skimming the first chapter. I found it confusing, dull, and hardly fun. I also suspect that more people own than read this book - and that a majority of readers are simply fulfilling classroom assignments. How many people want to exchange their precious free time to struggle with this difficult text?

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: beautifully written
Review: I'm sorry I can't offer a better opinion on the accuracy of this book, which did seem to have something of an agenda when I read it. I'm not a linguist. I did find it an interesting read, though, and it challenged me to think about the topics raised.

(Since I read eclectically in many topics but am "expert" in few, I'm used to taking books with a grain of salt. It's not a bad practice, especially if you can't run the book by several real experts.)

That aside--I'd be tempted to hand this book to an English class as a lesson in *style.* Content aside, Pinker's writing is entertaining and lovely. Which probably isn't the purpose he was looking to accomplish, but hey. I wish more books were written this way (with much importance given to the content, OC--but good content doesn't *have* to preclude good style).

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Pinker Should Write For Time Magazine
Review: I just finished the book and think it shares a few things in common with weekly newsmagazines: it is fun to read, Pinker spices his subject with numerous references to pop culture; where there are competing explenations the author doesn't weigh their strengths and weaknesses but goes with the theory he likes; the more I knew about a particular subject the less satisfied I was with the author's presentation, he's the journalist who flies to a new country and writes as if he knows the situation after three days.

I hate Time Magazine. If that's your taste, though, you'll enjoy this book. If you know little about linguistics this book can be a good introduction, the author covers a range of subjects and offers spirited arguments for all of them. Pinker's style, however, is infuriating when it comes to some subjects, he doesn't engage competing theories so much as turns them into straw men so he can knock them down. He comes off as the wunderkind who is trying too hard to impress the teacher.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Linguistics Made Easy...Sort Of
Review: Linguistics isn't a topic for everybody. But for those who have at least a curiosity about it, this book provides an excellent base from which to start. Pinker's focus is primarily the cognitive side of linguistics, and provides an enormous amount of data, all written with great wit and style. This particular book was written for the purpose of reaching the masses, so if you are interested in more concrete studies in cognitive linguistics, this book is not for you. Like I said, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT is a terrific jumping of point, providing many references for further reading in many other areas. It's a fun and informative read.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: wait a sec...
Review: Quick comment: disparagingly calls "academic thought-criticisms," as if they were of a different, inferor, somehow less relevant breed than non-academic muscle-criticisms, or something.

Pinker does a fine job of being entertaining and of making linguistics sound interesting; I would not dispute that. But his gross exagerrations and ridiculous claims are simply unnecessary, akin to the political ideologue who has a point and then pushes it to the hilt. It's all or nothing with the ideologue, and the same goes for Pinker.

This book would have been no less entertaining if Pinker had screened out the claims he knows are suspect or false. Some positive reviewers seem to be insinuating that the "thought-criticisms" of us lowly experts and interested laymen should be shunted aside: what's _really_ important is how _interesting_ he makes linguistics!

Compare this to a book on physics. Suppose, in his famous 1962-63 lectures, Feynman had made a bunch of outrageous and sometimes false claims about the "state of the art" in physics. Physicists would be up in arms as these lectures were eventually made into popular intros to physics. I can imagine people like the below poo-pooing those physicists because the issue isn't accuracy but how _fun_ Feynman had made physics.

Perhaps this is all postmodernism at work. The text has no value on its own, and facts exist only for the individual. Well, bring on the dark ages, please.

Read this book... be entertained... learn that a linguist is not "someone who knows many languages," and that there's no such thing as a "primitive" human language... But please, take it all with a grain of salt.

(From someone who doesn't make a penny from alleged "grants" or anything else remotely involved with linguistics. Not that non-Chomskyans need it, since they're the ones who usually get the grant before the Chomskyans, for better or worse.)

P.S.: And Pinker is _not_ a linguist! What's wrong with you people? He's a cognitive psychologist with a fetish for his colleague's (Chomsky's) profession. There is a difference. Jeez.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The one book on linguistics for the layperson
Review: For the educated layperson, this book is the most fascinating and engaging introduction to linguistics I have come across. I know some college students who had received xeroxed handouts of one chapter from this book, and these were students who were just bored of reading handouts week after week... but after reading just a few paragraphs from The Language Instinct, they were hooked, fascinated, and really wanted to read the whole book (and did). I wish I had come across such a book years ago...

If you've wished you'd taken linguistics, and never did, get this book. This one book will do it for you! Pinker is intelligent, but more importantly is a master of illustrative examples for the layperson. However, the text is never "dumbed-down" and can be a challenge to any reader.

I've read some of the other readers' reviews... unfortunately some focus more on applying academic thought-criticisims of his nativist viewpoint. Certainly, if you are coming from an academic bent, yes, I would agree that it would be a gross misrepresentation to say that Pinker presents the definitive state of the art in linguistics, or that all linguists think like he does... in fact, the critical reviewers are right, Pinker is but one linguist in one theoretical camp, the "nativist" camp, i.e. the theory that genes drive language and its acquisition in a task-specific manner. But so what? Pinker's theory is not what drives enjoyment of the book; it's the enthusiasm and skill with which he can introduce any reader to the topic of the study of language! : It's not dry! It's fun!

His viewpoint is already apparent by the title; the true value of this gem of a book is for introducing to the layperson LINGUISTICS and the depth of the kinds of questions that can be asked about language... these questions can be "beautiful," and certainly most readers would not have thought of these issues themselves, yet after Pinker's examples, it all makes wonderful sense, and is memorable and lucid. Whether or not the reader agrees with Pinker after becoming sophisticated upon further readings is not relevant; without The Language Instinct, Pinker's engaging introduction to the field, many would never wish to become linguistically sophisticated in the first place!

The sort of reader who should pay attention to the specific thought-criticisms of some of the other reviewers should really be elsewhere, reading and critiquing Pinker's academic works, e.g. journal articles, or his book "Language Learnability and Language Development," not nitpicking a book meant for introducing the masses to the beauty of language! If you aren't a linguist, I would hazard that the majority of potential readers are safe to completely ignore these thought-criticisms when pondering their potential enjoyment of purchasing this book from Amazon.

These critical reviewers should be reading/writing journal articles in the academic literature! However if you are in the grey area of reading this book for an academic reason not strictly defined as Linguistics, these specific thought-criticisms are valid to take note of and to consider-- I would concede that some niches of academics (e.g. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of chimpanzee artificial language) may be taking The Language Instinct text, a book for the layperson, as an academic gospel of the entire field of Linguistics, without really considering the underlying technical issues or counterarguments.

Overall, you likely won't find another book which presents the beauty & complexity of language with the ease of The Language Instinct. If you are to have but one book in your library on language, this should be the one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Brilliant intro for layman, excellent arguments for experts
Review: You ought to ignore the less-stellar reviews here; they're obviously written by experts dissatisfied with Dr. Pinker's conclusions, people who probably have grants at stake, and are not written by the audience this book speaks best to.

And it speaks *beautifully*. If you're not professionally involved in the more technical aspects of the debates explored here, if you couldn't care less about ending sentences with prepositions but don't know why others would, and you have a pulse, you're bound to enjoy this brilliant introduction to linguistics, which also illustrates fascinating points about literature, neurology, genetics, evolution, class systems, history, children, baseball and crossword puzzles. (whew.) Rife with pop culture references (who could quote Dorothy Parker, Dan Quayle, Bob Dylan and Shakespeare successfully but this man, who admits to loving the word "diss" and disliking "whom"?), this book will keep you from reading your next few copies of both Reader's Digest and the New Yorker; you could even toss the Bach tapes you play for your 4-year-olds and just read them this at bedtime. And, you know, that's a good thing.

"I have never met a person who is not interested in language," Dr. Pinker begins. No other instinct more steadily binds us and defines us as human, and no other book has poured so much cool information into such spellbinding writing as this one. Dr. Pinker, take another bow. There are roses waiting in the green room.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: At least he was right about mentalese!
Review: It's a good high level overview, especially of the Chomskyan revolution (and who wants to read Chomsky?) Pinker does a disservice in presenting speculation as fact, but in this he is just being faithful to the dominant scientific-philosophical paradigm. I bought the hardback in 1995, but couldn't bear to read it until recently. His explanation of how the brain is a Turing information processor, without invoking the homunculus, is particularly egregious. BUT: He is right about mentalese. The operations of consciousness are rule-governed, like a grammar. It has nothing to do with biology but everything to do with the structure of consciousness. Since Fodor is unreadable, Pinker is a good entry point to the discussion of mentalese, which everyone should understand. Pinker would be a good writer for the Economist or similar serious magazine, but must be taken with a large grain of salt otherwise.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I made me think about thinking
Review: I'm not a linguist or a psychologist and I have to admit that my knowledge in this area of science is pretty limited. I cannot judge Pinker's book on it's content but on how it has helped me in my day to day job. I'm a data architect in an international consulting firm. My day to day work is to translate what the business rules are into data structures that can support the computer systems build around them. My biggest problem has always been translating what am I hearing from the business community into a coherent set of rules that can be implemented using current database technology. Now that I understand a little more on how people think (At least I has been led believe that I got a little smarter after reading this book)and how people communicate what they think my job has become a little easier and more effective.


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