A bible for any creator of an artificial language
Not having read the whole book yet, but being in the process, and having been asked by Amazon to write a review; ...
... In reading the book, I am being overloaded with tons of interesting language- thought correspondences and their opposites, which one just does not think about when one just speaks a language and, indeed, when one "just" learns another one. There are so many logical extras to language, which non linguists never think about. But if you want to create a language, this book would be one that you would have to know backwards; like a conscientious christian knows his bible. Without this book it will be very hard to make your artificial language consice and better than the natural languages, and then, your artificial language, your creation, will just be another one in the long line of failed artificial languages.
Fascinating, deep, and satisfying
In his inimitably thoughtful and engaging style, Pinker explains the field of conceptual semantics to the lay reader, and shows what modern theoretical linguistics reveals about how human beings think. The book is in some sense an integration of Pinker's previous books The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and How the Mind Works.
Human thought, Pinker argues, is built around certain primitive concepts, including space, force, dominance, agency, animacy, sex, and contamination. In the most interesting chapters he shows how our human conceptions of space, time, and matter are reflected in linguistic features like tense, aspect, and the count/mass distinction. The relatively recent research results of Beth Levin and her colleagues in the area of lexical semantics, summarized in Chapter 2, are particularly illuminating, as they reveal how seemingly random variations in verb subcategorization patterns actually reflect deep, underlying conceptual schemas in the mind.
In the final chapters Pinker offers the optimistic conclusion that we need not be permanently shackled by our limited primate brains; scientific progress relies on our remarkable ability to extend our knowledge to new domains through the use of metaphor, analogy, and linguistic combinatorics. "The goal of education," Pinker concludes, "is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world."
Evolution of language
Being a newcomer to the analysis and debate of linguistics, the opening parts of the book felt a little heavy - Pinker assumes a certain level of knowledge of the topic area. Having said that, I am glad I persisted as I later found many interesting parallels to the study of NLP (Natural Language Processing) in the computer science community, and eventually the 'academic' is replaced with hundreds of references and insightful case studies on how we use our language, why we structure it the way we do, and what it says about us.
The book really picks up in the latter half as Pinker picks apart numerous examples of our speech, and life situations (politics, power, sex, and so on), and explains the language and foundation behind it. Linguistics offers a fascinating perspective on how our minds operate, and this is a great introduction. I am looking forward to reading more about the topic in the feature.
Always Educational
Steven Pinker is one of the greatest minds we have. The Blank Slate is on my top 20 lifetime list for books and I've enjoyed seeing him in interviews (and one outstanding debate) online. The Stuff of Thought unfortunately is fairly pedestrian by his standards. To me, this book was far more about language than it was human nature or psychology. As far as linguistics is concerned readers learn much but the same cannot be said in terms of it providing a window into our souls. Some of the wordplay was entertaining and he is insightful concerning speech but not enough psychology was illuminated here in my view to warrant opening it again.
Lacks 'stuff' on the physiological and cognitive origins of language
Although Pinker is renown in the field of linguistics, I was a bit disappointed with the single sidedness of this book. In it, he examines the origins of the English language, but to a large degree fails to introduce the factors attributing to the physiological and cognitive results from the birth of language. I anticipated a book with more in-depth research on the origins and effects of language on the formation of consciousness and cognition. An example of such book is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's "Genes, Peoples, and Language,' which I highly recommend.
