The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
from Penguin (Non-Classics)

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• Worthwhile, but could have been shorter
  There were things I liked about "The Stuff of Thought" and things I didn't. I would have preferred the book to be shorter. I certainly could take away many profound observations. However, I don't think Pinker had to go into so many examples, although I am sure many readers will like that. Anyway, here are some important things which I will remember from the book.
  1. We can learn a lot about people from the way they put together words. Pinker shows many examples.
  2. What is an event? 9-11 was an... more info

• A bible for any creator of an artificial language
  Not having read the whole book yet, but being in the process, and having been asked by Amazon to write a review; ...
  ... In reading the book, I am being overloaded with tons of interesting language- thought correspondences and their opposites, which one just does not think about when one just speaks a language and, indeed, when one "just" learns another one. There are so many logical extras to language, which non linguists never think about. But if you want to create a language, this book would be one... more info

• Fascinating, deep, and satisfying
  In his inimitably thoughtful and engaging style, Pinker explains the field of conceptual semantics to the lay reader, and shows what modern theoretical linguistics reveals about how human beings think. The book is in some sense an integration of Pinker's previous books The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and How the Mind Works.
  Human thought, Pinker argues, is built around certain primitive concepts, including space, force, dominance, agency, animacy, sex, and contamination. In the most interesting... more info

• Evolution of language
  Being a newcomer to the analysis and debate of linguistics, the opening parts of the book felt a little heavy - Pinker assumes a certain level of knowledge of the topic area. Having said that, I am glad I persisted as I later found many interesting parallels to the study of NLP (Natural Language Processing) in the computer science community, and eventually the 'academic' is replaced with hundreds of references and insightful case studies on how we use our language, why we structure it the way we do, and... more info

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