Hey, look at me!I'm a writer! |
| Saturday, February 23, 2008 |
| The Stuff of Thought (Steven Pinker) |
 There was a time during my college years when I seriously considered majoring in computational linguistics. Of course, there was also a time during my college years when I stayed up until 6am drinking and then spent the entirety of my cafeteria manager shift trying to stay awake in the walk-in freezer. The idea of me being a linguist of any kind may have been just as stupid.Be that as it may, I still enjoy learning about almost anything language-related. Which is probably why Sara picked The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker pretty much out of the blue for me for Christmas. I've spent the last several weeks reading this 500-page linguistic treatise bit by little bit, and now that I'm done I feel like I need to regurgitate some of it back here for fear of losing it entirely. (Regurgitating on friends and family has produced less-than-desirable results.) The Stuff of Thought starts innocently enough: with babies. Specifically, how do babies/children learn the complex structure of language. Even more specifically, how do they learn the nuances of sentence construction in such a way that they understand instinctively that while one could either "stuff bread into the turkey" or "stuff the turkey with bread", one cannot both "pour water into the cup" and "pour the cup with water". The latter sounds awkward to any native English speaker, and does so even with the verbs being used are rarely heard. (E.g., which do you prefer: "festoon the ribbons onto the bandstand" or "festoon the bandstand with ribbons"? Why?) It would take more than just a blog post (a 500-page book, perhaps) to explain the intricacies the way that Pinker does, but the answer has to do with how we conceptualize the language we use, endowing verbs not just with specific endings or the ability to take direct objects, but with spatial, temporal and causal properties. (Stuffing a turkey is about changing the state of a turkey -- from unstuffed to stuffed, but pouring water isn't really about the cup, it's about the act of pouring, which fills the cup only indirectly, with gravity acting as a middleman ... well, like I said, the explanation is complicated.) Later chapters describe our innate use of physics in language, how certain metaphors pervade our speech and idioms, the difficulty of coining new words, why popular names ebb and flow, and -- likely to be everyone's favorite chapter, as it was mine -- the use of taboo words in language, including a lengthy and hilarious description of the unique grammatical properties of the word "fuck". If the description I've given so far hasn't gotten you excited, you may not be enough of a grammar geek to enjoy this book. Keep in mind that it's often quite funny, and Pinker sprinkles in enough anecdotes, movie references and even comic strips to keep things rolling. Furthermore, some of what he comes up with is downright surprising, both his theories and the examples he uses. (Did you know, for example, that the girl's name "Madison" -- currently the third most popular girl's name in America -- comes from Daryl Hannah's character in the movie Splash?) But he doesn't skimp on the real linguistic theory; there were definitely paragraphs here and there that required double reading, and several 50-cent words thrown in where -- I'm guessing here because I'm too freakin' lazy to pick up a dictionary -- a 10-cent word would probably have done as well. In the end, I'd say that this book reminded me mostly of a really good lecture, the kind I sometimes had the pleasure of attending in college. That is, when I wasn't hung over in the walk-in freezer. Good lord, that was stupid. |
| // posted by dug @ 9:00 PM [link] [comments (1)] |
This is Me. [*] |
| Blogs I Visit: |
|
Defective Yeti Fanatical Apathy Apostropher OnReligion.Com Static Zombie This Modern World |
| Where I Waste Time: |
|
Working For Change (great comics) Uselab - Acno's Energizer (darn that level 35!) Ironic Times |
| My News Sources: |
|
National Public Radio (the show, not the site) On The Media (these shows I download) Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me The Onion (America's Finest News Source) |
[*] Okay, no it's not. I found it somewhere in the Blogosphere.
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