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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Lexicography
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Learnability and Cognition - The Acquisition of Argument Structure (Paperback, new edition)
Loot Price: R1,307
Discovery Miles 13 070
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Learnability and Cognition - The Acquisition of Argument Structure (Paperback, new edition)
Series: Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure,
with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs."
Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human
nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language
acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science.
Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought
together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue,
and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as
space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this
synthesis was set by 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 sound natural, but pour the
glass with water and fill water into the glass sound odd. How can
this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected for
uttering odd sentences, and they don't just parrot back the correct
ones they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox
with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses of
verbs, and explores that theory's implications for language,
thought, and the relationship between them. As Pinker writes in a
new preface, "The Secret Life of Verbs," the phenomena and ideas he
explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical
discussions, he notes, provide insight not just into language
acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientific understanding,
political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go
into obscenity.
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