Language Game

What is language, why do we have it, and why does it matter? Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater take on one of humanity's most remarkable achievements, and one that scientists still understand surprisingly poorly. The authors challenge centuries of scholarship, including the more recent work of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Their central claim is that people do not learn to talk by absorbing fixed meanings and grammatical rules. Instead, we pick up small fragments of language, reuse them, and recombine them in new ways as we go. Using examples from around the world, the book works through a series of questions. How does our fleeting memory cope with the constant stream of sound that makes up everyday speech? Why is language so hard for researchers to explain when toddlers learn it with ease? Why do the world's languages differ so widely, and why does no two people's version of a language match exactly? Why do humans have language when chimpanzees do not? The authors also look at how language helped give us larger brains and altered the course of evolution, and how it shapes the way we think without limiting it. They close by arguing that what we now know about language gives reason for hope about our future.