This is a truly fascinating book, really putting in perspective for me how language is a window into human nature. It is packed with facts, stories, examples and pure knowledge. There is just a bit too much of it, and some of it is too scholarly for my taste. Pinker uses too much space to explain theories he dosn't support, and the reader is left wondering why. The language itself, ironically, is at times too complicated.
However, some of the chapters are true gems, lifechanging I would say... ( )

Steven Pinker really is an amazing writer: amazing for his ability to attract crank reviews for his books.

Let’s take KromesTomes’s review as our example: one star, with the main (or rather the only) criticism being that Pinker is a ‘terribly “loose” writer’.

Now, for me, this is strange. It is easy to disagree with some of Pinker’s ideas, as he takes a contentious stand in some of the most fundamental debates in philosophy, psychology and linguistics. His writing style is not normally so controversial – for a writer who likes to tackle the big issues, his prose is unusually lucid.

Most people have a stereotype of academic writing in their heads: they think it is dense and dull. Like many stereotypes, it has some truth to it – many academic papers are impenetrable even to specialists in the same field. Academic writing on language, strangely enough, suffers just as much as any other field. Steven Pinker’s writing definitely does not fall into this category – he tries to engage with the reader, to stir up and maintain interest. This is definitely a good idea, as linguistics can be a little dry – try Steven Ullmann’s Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning as bedtime reading.

So, Pinker uses “actually” in a way which is not recorded in Webster’s. Well, I have news (I’m whispering): sometimes people use words in ways which are different to those described in the dictionary. Sometimes they even use words which aren’t even in the dictionary! Imagine that! Actually (can I say that?), this use is in my dictionary (the Oxford): “used to emphasize that something someone has said or done is surprising”. Yet, this is beside the point, which is that it is not at all difficult to know exactly what Pinker meant when he wrote that sentence, just as I know what is meant by a “loose” writer. I’m sure no native speaker of English requires a dictionary to understand it.

Google doesn’t sell noun phrases? Well, it sells to companies wishing to advertise on their search engine the right to have their ads display when certain words, usually noun phrases, are entered into the search box by a user. As I have worked on Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Google in this arena, I know that it is common within the industry to speak of “buying and selling keywords”, rather than use a two or three dozen word sentence as I’ve just done. Not only does it save a lot of time in meetings, but this linguistic phenomenon also has a name: synecdoche. I’m sure that one’s in Webster’s.

One could pick holes in the English used in the review: some people would object to the comma placed inside the inverted commas in “selling noun phrases,” as this implies that it is part of the quote, or to the use of “but” at the start of a sentence. You might say this is pedantry – I would agree and I apologise – but picking holes in perfectly clear and understandable language (or “how people use language in the real world”) is not restricted to this or the below review. Indeed, Pinker devoted a whole chapter of The Language Instinct to linguistic prescriptivism (Chapter 12 – The Language Mavens).

Don’t get me started on the count nouns and mass nouns thing, as I wouldn’t want to keep you here for another ten minutes, although it’s, erm, actually really interesting.

Have a read – you’ll enjoy it, even if you don’t agree with it. No dictionary needed. ( )

Enjoyed as book on tape. Could read chapters as they interested me.

This was really interesting. The author is a professor of psychology at Harvard. He has written a number of other books about language and how it works. This one was about how language reflects how our brains work.
I felt like I really learned a lot about the ordering of language. The way he groups categories of nouns, verbs, etc. according to how they are used and how they can be formed into sentences makes much more sense than the traditional ways of organizing language that you find in a prescriptive grammar, or that we all learned in school. In fact, one of my lowest grades was in my required English grammar class at BYU.
I don't think I'm going to go into how cause and effect seems to be mirrored in language, and not just English, but many others. Mostly because I would have to read the book again in order to properly summarize it. So if you are interested, look this one up in your own library.
There was one point I really liked. He has a chapter discussing swearing; why, how, common themes among all languages. One point he made that I had wondered about was why swearing is so forceful and unpleasant. He said that when a person swears, he forces anyone in hearing range to think about something disgusting or extremely unpleasant. It is a means of social aggression, which is why young men, in the "swagger" phase, are notorious for using it. He also said something which I have thought for a long time, but he said it so nicely:

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about
where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is
the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it's worth considering
how often one really wants one's audience to be reminded of excrement, urine,
and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the
listener's attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs
in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener, and a confession by the
speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending
to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing
their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English
lexicon. ( )

A continuation of his ideas from Blank Slate and Language Instinct. Pinker argues that the way we think shapes the way we express ourselves through language. We are all born with a basic framework for time, substance (that includes number sense), space and causation which are innate in our brain and which, in turn, give us the basic framework of how we think. Then, how we think dictates how we put ideas into words, with basic notions common to all humans and specific cultures filling in the details with new concepts and words.
Pinker makes interesting points about metaphors, obscenities and language games people play. Metaphors are quite ubiquitous in our communication as an expression of the spatial and causal way we think; we basically speak in them (e.g. Let's move the meeting to Friday.). Interestingly enough, we cannot completely control our reaction to swear words and profanities because we react to them (and use them alike) with the underlying, older, automatic and instinctive parts of the brain.
As usual, I enjoyed Pinker's super logical way of thinking and organizing information. ( )

This book earns quite the dubious distinction. It becomes the first one that I haven't at least skimmed through to the finish since I gave up on Ulysses about 20 years ago.

The problem is simple: Pinker is a terribly "loose" writer, which is poison in a book about language, and especially one that deals with semantics. The best (worst?) example of what I mean was this sentence, which is the one that caused me to finally give up on the book: "The most successful new corporation in this century so far is Google, which made its fortune by actually selling noun phrases."

In the text, Pinker italicizes "selling noun phrases," but I can't figure out how to do that here. And regardless, what I would emphasize is the word "actually." In my copy of Webster's, the word is defined as "as a matter of actual fact; really."

So, what Pinker has done here is akin to when people use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" or "metaphorically." Because what Google is "actually" doing in Pinker's example is selling the right for companies to be listed at the top of a Google search page when people search for given combinations of words.

Google doesn't literally own any noun phrases to sell, and the companies that pay Google don't receive any kind of ownership in anything.

Turning a page or two, Pinker then starts a discussion about what he calls "count nouns" and "mass nouns." According to him we can "pluralize count nouns (two pebbles) but not mass nouns (*two gravels)."

(In the original, the material in the parentheses is in itals, and the asterisk indicates a "wrong" usage.)

Yet when one googles the word gravels, it's obvious that the plural IS widely in use, from book titles such as "Gems, Granites, and Gravels: Knowing and Using Rocks and Minerals" to the landscaping firm that notes "Sierra Nevada White Granite landscaping gravels create a distinct and natural contrast with your plants and other stone."

Now, I've read a few of Pinker's other books, so I know he's got some interesting insights into how the brain works with language, etc., etc. But, speaking as a professional writer myself, I consider this particular book an example of what happens when you get an author who doesn't understand that good, clear writing requires just as much expertise as neuroscience.

You can get away with that in some books, but not in one the very subject of which involves how people use language in the real world. ( )

Wow! What a great writer on this subject. This linguistics professor at Harvard has written many books on linguistics. This one asks the question, does language shape our brain. The answer seems to be that our brain structure shapes our thoughts and language and our individual culture shapes the particulars of the language.

Innate ideas about space, time and causality are woven into our language, so a close look at our speech can give us insight into who we are. ( )

This book has a larger focus on linguistics than The Blank Slate. I didn't enjoy this as much, mostly because I felt out of my depth in a lot of it. A couple of the chapters had some interesting tidbits, but overall I thought it was only so-so.

(Alistair) Well, I haven't booklogged a non-fiction book for quite a while, and here is why; it's because it took me a good while to read through The Stuff of Thought. Not because it's hard to read, but because it's well worth taking the time to read carefully and let inwardly ferment.

This is an excellent book, whether you're interested in thought, or interested in language, or just easily interested, period. Within, Stephen Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, takes us through what our use of language reveals about the way we think, and how therefore the structures of our language may reveal, and to what extent they may reflect, the hardwired cognitive concepts that we have.

In addressing these issues, he takes us through our languages assumptions on space, time and causality; our use of metaphor as a tool to illustrate and to think with, the generation of names, expletives, politeness, and language in relationships and as a social tool, delving into what each one can tell us about our minds, before closing with a look at language as a tool for exceeding our cognitive limits. (And, of course, as others have said before me, the chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" is probably worth the price of the book itself...)

Highly recommended for anyone interested in thought, language, or the interface between the two, which since we all think, speak, and write, ought to be damn near everybody.

(Yes, yes, I know it isn't. Meh. Zombies, the lot of them.)

Warning, however: by the standards of most "popular science" books, this is meaty, and does not shy from expecting you to be able to handle complex ideas and think, dammit. Not for the weak or hard of thinking.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... ) ( )

I picked this up for the passages about metaphor and human thinking, and those parts did not disappoint. The rest was unremarkable, though. A warning: Pinker has a Garfield-comic-strip sense of humor: jokes about the slowness of the DMV, and so on. ( )

The first linguistics book I ever read was the Language Instinct, and I've been a fan of Pinker's since then, so I was pretty excited to get another one of his books as it came out. He bills this one as a view through semantics and pragmatics to human nature, and definitely does his best to make a case for it. It's a pretty interesting walk, and not really heavy reading.

Pinker looks at a variety of phenomena, such as the digital nature of time and space in human thought, the availability of certain microclasses to participate in alternations, the nature and situations of profanity in language, and the use of implicatures to save face, and says that these allow deep insights into what's going on in people's minds. I don't really dispute this, and the arguments are cogent and well presented, so it's enjoyable to go through. I have to say that a lot of it didn't come as a surprise, but the stuff that was more psychological was new, and it's synthesized well.

I don't think that this is an earth-shaking book, but it's a good and interesting look at the topic, and it should be easy to understand for the layman, so if you want to get someone to have an idea of what's going on in semantics and pragmatics, this isn't a bad way to go. I'm already lending it out, so it's definitely at that level. I look forward to reading more of his work in the future. ( )

An amazing look at our language, with much insight into what linguistics & semantics are all about. Pinker lets the novice become privy to what experts / academics are looking into. Witty, full of neat examples. Chapters on names, taboo words, metaphor etc. ( )

Conceptual semantics: "word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought" (p 150). Lots of good, long chapters on the semantics, pragmatics, and cultural correlations of natural language.