The Language Game

'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter?Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing capacity - and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:* How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.* Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.* Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language.* Why humans have language, but chimps don't.* How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution.* How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.*And ultimately, why what we have come to understand about how language works, gives us greater hope for our future.Forget the language instinct - this is the story of how we make up language as we go.