The Language Game

byMorten H. Christiansen, Nick Chater, Peter Noble (Read by)

How improvisation created language and changed the world

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'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett
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What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter?
Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.
Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:
· How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.
· Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.
· Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language.
· Why humans have language, but chimps don't.
· How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution
· How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.
·And ultimately, why what we have come to understand about how language works, gives us greater hope for our future.

The Language Game is a highly original, convincing story of how humans developed their greatest invention, language. A delight to read, it deserves careful study by anyone interested in the nature, function, and origins of human communication.




Daniel Everett, author of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes and How Language Began

About Morten H. Christiansen

Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs. He was awarded the Cognitive Psychology Section Award from the British Psychological Society in 2013 and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2006. He was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2009, made Fellow of the Psychonomic Society in 2013, elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2017 and elected as a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2021 and a foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2022. He lives with his family in New York.
Details
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529193961
  • Length: 590 minutes
  • Price: £13.00
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