Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (new edition)

By: Steven Pinker

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote severaltechnical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two bigtopics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categoriesof meaning such as space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was setby the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly subtle distinctions:pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water soundnatural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into theglass sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected foruttering odd sentences, and they don't just parrot back the correct ones they hear from theirparents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses ofverbs, and explores that theory's implications for language, thought, and the relationship betweenthem. As Pinker writes in a new preface, "The Secret Life of Verbs," thephenomena and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff ofThought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions, he notes,provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientificunderstanding, political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go intoobscenity.