The  language instinct
Subtitle: How the Mind Creates Language
By: Steven Pinker.
Edition: 1st HarperPerennial ed.
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 494
Subjects: Language and languages; Biolinguistics
Other titles: How the mind creates language
Description: From the Preface...

I have never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret.

For the language lover, I hope to show that there is a world of elegance and richness in quotidian speech that far outshines the local curiosities of etymologies, unusual words, and fine points of usage.

For the reader of popular science, I hope to explain what is behind the recent discoveries (or, in many cases, nondiscoveries) reported in the press: universal deep structures, brainy babies, grammar genes, artifically intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral children, paradoxical brain damage, identical twins separated at birth, color pictures of the thinking brain, and the search for the mother of all languages. I also hope to answer many natural questions about languages, like why there are so many of them, why they are so hard for adults to learn, and why no one seems to know the plural of Walkman.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 447-472) and index.
Originally published: New York : W. Morrow and Co., c1994.
Table of contents: title: Title Page; title: Dedication; title: Preface; label: 1
title: An Instinct to Acquire an Art; label: 2
title: Chatterboxes; label: 3
title: Mentalese; label: 4
title: How Language Works; label: 5
title: Words, Words, Words; label: 6
title: The Sounds of Silence; label: 7
title: Talking Heads; label: 8
title: The Tower of Babel; label: 9
title: Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven; label: 10
title: Language Organs and Grammar Genes; label: 11
title: The Big Bang; label: 12
title: The Language Mavens; label: 13
title: Mind Design; title: Notes; title: References; title: Glossary