Keeping Those Words in Mind
eBook - ePub

Keeping Those Words in Mind

How Language Creates Meaning

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Keeping Those Words in Mind

How Language Creates Meaning

About this book

How can humans keep thousands of words in mind and have no difficulty understanding trillions of sentences? The answer to this question might lie in parents teaching their children language skills, or in in the human brain, which may be equipped with a language instinct or maybe in impressive memory skills that link words to their perceptual information. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to some of these explanations. But one answer – perhaps the most important answer – has been largely ignored. Keeping Those Words in Mind tries to remedy this oversight.

Linguist and cognitive psychologist Max Louwerse, PhD. argues that understanding language is not just possible because of memory, brains, environment and computation, but because of the patterns in the sequence of sounds and words themselves.He demonstrates that what seems to be an arbitrary communication system, with arbitrary characters and sounds that become words, and arbitrary meanings for those words, actually is a well-organized system that has evolved over tens of thousands of years to make communication as efficient as it is. What is needed for humans to acquire language, is for humans to recognize and discover the patterns in our communication system.

By examining how our brains process language and find patterns, the intricacies of the language system itself, and even scientific breakthroughs in computer science and artificial intelligence, Keeping Those Words in Mind brings a brand new and interdisciplinary explanation for our ability to extract meaning from language.

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Yes, you can access Keeping Those Words in Mind by Max Louwerse in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Prometheus
Year
2021
eBook ISBN
9781633886513

Table of contents

  1. Prologue
  2. 1 Words
  3. 2 Language
  4. 3 Guess
  5. 4 Training
  6. 5 Instinct
  7. 6 Network
  8. 7 Grounding
  9. 8 Shortcut
  10. 9 Patterns
  11. 10 Sound
  12. 11 Order
  13. 12 Company
  14. 13 Bootstrapping
  15. 14 Avenues
  16. Notes
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. Bibliography