In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, well-known for his revolutionary theory of how children acquire language, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. With wit, education, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
In this "extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written" (Noam Chomsky), one of the greatest thinkers in the field of linguistics explains how language works--how people, ny making noises with their mouths, can cause ideas to arise in other people's minds.