If Pinker is right, the origins of language go much further back than 30,000 years ago (the date most commonly given in textbooks)-perhaps to Homo habilis, who lived 2.5 million years ago, or even eons earlier. In this exciting synthesis-an entertaining, totally accessible study that will regale language lovers and challenge professionals in many disciplines-Pinker builds a bridge between ``innatists'' like MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who hold that infants are biologically programmed for language, and ``social interactionists'' who contend that they acquire it largely from the environment. To Pinker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psycholinguist, the explanation for this miracle is that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly ``hard-wired'' into the brain and partly learned. A three-year-old toddler is ``a grammatical genius''-master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |