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The Language Game
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  • Published: 14 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529193961
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Peter Noble
Categories:

The Language Game

How improvisation created language and changed the world

Formats & editions
Paperback
22 Aug 2023
Audiobook
14 Apr 2022
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What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter? The Language Game draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.

'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett
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What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter?
Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.
Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:
· How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.
· Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.
· Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language.
· Why humans have language, but chimps don't.
· How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution
· How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.
·And ultimately, why what we have come to understand about how language works, gives us greater hope for our future.
  • Published: 14 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529193961
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Peter Noble
Categories:

About the authors

Morten H. Christiansen

One of the world’s leading language scientists, Morten is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University as well as Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs and Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He was awarded the Cognitive Psychology Section Award from the British Psychological Society in 2013 and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2006. He was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2009, made Fellow of the Psychonomic Society in 2013, and elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2017.

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Nick Chater

Nick Chater is a professor of behavioural science at the Warwick Business School. He was awarded the Rumelhart Prize for lifetime achievement in cognitive science in 2023. Nick has advised the UK Government and co-founded Decision Technology, a research consultancy.

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