Title: The Language Game

Summary:

What is language? Why do we have it? Why does it matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most amazing achievement and remains poorly understood. The book "The Language Game" overturns centuries of research and explains how people learn to speak not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by gathering, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in new ways.

Here are some of the topics explored in the book:

• How our short-term memory handles everyday speech.
• Why language is a challenge for language scientists, yet learned effortlessly by toddlers.
• Why the world's languages are so diverse and why no one speaks exactly the same language.
• Why humans have language, while chimpanzees do not.
• How language gave us big brains and changed the course of evolution.
• How language does not limit, but shapes our way of thinking.
• And ultimately, why everything we know about language should give us hope.

Pages: 368

Dimensions: 12.7x12.7cm