Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Learnability and Cognition, New Edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Learnability and Cognition, New Edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

Pinker, Steven

Paperback

Series: Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change

PhilosophyLinguisticsGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0262518406
ISBN13: 9780262518406
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: May 24 2013
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.49
Height: 0.89 Width: 5.84 Depth: 9.11
Language: English
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.

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