Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker is a highly eminent cognitive scientist, and his research emphasizes the importance of language and its connections to cognition, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. The thirteen essays in this eclectic collection span Pinker's thirty-year career, ranging over topics such as language acquisitions, visual cognition, the meaning and syntax of verbs, regular and irregular phenomena in language and their implications for the mechanisms of cognition, and the social psychology of direct and indirect speech. Each outlines a major theory - such as evolution, or nature vs. nurture - or takes up an argument with other prominent scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this book represents a major contribution to the field of cognitive science, by one of the field's leading thinkers.