The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar - Hardcover

Baker, Mark C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465005217 ISBN 13: 9780465005215

Verlag: Basic Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality-and thus the mutual intelligibility-of human thought.We are now on the verge of answering this question. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough, both within linguistics, which will thereby become a full-fledged science for the first time, and in our understanding of the human mind.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark C. Baker is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He lives in Camden, New Jersey.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Basic Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0465005217
• ISBN 13: 9780465005215
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar