Price | RM71.00 |
Product SKU | 9781846682681 |
Brand | Profile Books LTD |
Reward Points | 71 |
Points Needed | 14200 |
Availability | Out Of Stock |
Description
Language: The Cultural Tool - Softcover
Author: Daniel Everett
Publisher: Profile Books
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 368
Weight: 300g
Like other tools, language was invented, can be reinvented or lost, and shows significant variation across cultures. It's as essential to survival as fire - and, like fire, is found in all human societies.
Language presents the bold and controversial idea that language is not an innate component of the brain, as has been famously argued by Chomsky and Pinker. Rather, it's a cultural tool which varies much more across different societies than the innateness view suggests.
Fusing adventure, anthropology, linguistics and psychology, and drawing on Everett's pioneering research with the Amazonian Pirahãs, Language argues that language is embedded within - and is inseparable from - its specific culture. This book is like a fire that will generate much light. And much heat.
Author
Daniel Everett is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Massachusetts. Previously, he was Chair of the department of languages, literatures and cultures at Illinois State University. He is the author of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.
Reviews
Impressively modest and reasoned ... deserves a serious reading
- Economist
Revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language
- Guardian
A book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity ... A very rich but also very readable book
- Sunday Times
The most important - and provocative - anthropological field work ever undertaken
- Tom Wolfe
Controversial, driven by data from across the sciences, and leavened with wit - Language: The Cultural Tool is the book on language I have been waiting and waiting for. A masterpiece, and then some
- Patricia S. Churchland