The Language Game

<p><strong>What is language?</strong><br /><strong>Why do we have it?</strong><br /><strong>Why does that matter?</strong><br /><br />Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood.<br /><br />Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) <em>The Language Game </em>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.<br /><br />Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:<br /><br />&middot; How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.<br />&middot; Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.<br />&middot; Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language.<br />&middot; Why humans have language, but chimps don't.<br />&middot; How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution.<br />&middot; How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.<br />&middot; And ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope.<br /><br /><strong>Christiansen and Chater's <em>The Language Game</em> draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.</strong></p>