In this lecture, Steven Pinker, renowned linguist and Harvard Psychology Professor, discusses linguistics as a window to understanding the human brain.
How is it that human beings have come to acquire language? Steven Pinker’s introduction to the field includes thoughts on the evolution of spoken language, the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar, and an exploration of why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution.
Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature.
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and PhD from Harvard. Currently, he is a Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard; he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including Visual Cognition, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Language Cognition and Human Nature, The Seven words you can’t say on Television, on the Origin of Art, Do humankind best days lie ahead?, The Stuff of Thought, and Rationality. ————————
Full transcript on: https://bigthink.com/videos/how-we-sp…
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Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century – with Steven Pinker.
Does writing well matter in an age of instant communication? Drawing on the latest research in linguistics and cognitive science, Steven Pinker replaces the recycled dogma of style guides with reason and evidence.
In this brand-new talk, introduced by Lord Melvyn Bragg, Steven argues that style still matters: in communicating effectively, in enhancing the spread of ideas, in earning a reader’s trust and, not least, in adding beauty to the world.
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and conducts research on language and cognition but also writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and is the author of many books, including The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works
. Melvyn Bragg is a broadcaster, writer and novelist. He was made a Life Peer (Lord Bragg of Wigton) in 1998. Since then he has hosted over 660 episodes of In Our Time on subjects ranging from Quantum Gravity to Truth. He was presenter of the BBC radio series The Routes of English, a history of the English language. He is currently Chancellor of the University of Leeds
www.rigb.org