Language

Helen Keller's autobiography, written at twenty-two, is the account of a mind constructed against unusual constraints — deaf and blind from nineteen months old, she learned language at seven and went on to read and write…

The argument that metaphor is not a literary ornament but the fundamental structure of human thought. We think in metaphors — argument is war, time is money, organisations are machines — and these frames shape what we ca…

The best popular defence of the nativist position on language. Pinker argues, following Chomsky, that the human capacity for grammar is a biological adaptation -- an instinct shaped by natural selection, not a cultural i…

Deacon's central question: how did a brain capable of symbolic reference -- language, mathematics, abstract thought -- evolve from primate ancestors that lacked it? His answer involves a coevolutionary spiral between ear…

Evans's argument is that software which resists maintenance is usually software whose model has drifted from the business it is meant to represent. The cure is ubiquitous language — the same words in code, in meetings an…

Part memoir, part linguistic bombshell. Everett arrived among the Pirahã of the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary and stayed for decades as a linguist. His claim -- that Pirahã lacks recursion, the property Chomsky declar…

Tomasello's argument, built on decades of comparative work with great apes and human infants, is that human communication did not begin with language but with pointing and pantomime -- cooperative gestures grounded in sh…

Where Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was a memoir with theoretical implications, this is the theoretical framework itself. Everett argues that language is a cultural invention -- a tool shaped by the communities that use…