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Award-winning, Independent Bookshop in South Dublin

The Company of Books is an award-winning, independent bookshop in Ranelagh, Dublin 6. We stock an extensive range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books which are available in the shop and on our site. 

Language Game, The

KDKWANMWFBE0T
€18.99
Out of stock
1
Product Details
ISBN: 9781787633490
Author: Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
Format: Paperback

What is language?
Why do we have it?
Why does that matter?

Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing accomplishment 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 all we know about language should give us hope.

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Awards

About The Company Of Books

The Company of Books opened at 96 Ranelagh Village in November 2009 and has been gathering good reviews and loyal customers since.  Country Finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year 2021 (Booksellers Association) and Dublin Winner of An Post Bookshop of the Year.

We have an eclectic mix of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books offering something for everyone. Spot a review of a book you’d like to read? Contact us and if we don’t have it, we’ll order it for you.

We also sell book vouchers and a range of beautiful cards and stationery.

Independent bookshop
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