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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature QUOTES

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature QUOTES

121 " emit, excrete, expectorate, expel, exude, secrete, spew, spit, vomit This disgusting list is made up of verbs in which the substance is expelled from inside a volume, though they differ in the kind of volume, the nature of the orifice, what the substance is, and how it is expelled. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

122 " Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

123 " According to conceptual semantics, the meanings of words and sentences are formulas in an abstract language of thought. According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways. Let me say at the outset that language surely affects thought-at the very least, if one person's words didn't affect another person's thoughts, language as a whole would be useless. The question is whether language determines thought-whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

124 " construe events. With the brush verbs, the agent applies force simultaneously to the stuff and the surface, so these verbs are naturally construed as affecting both entities, which is why they allow both constructions "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

125 " The preposition into means “to in,” namely, “to an interior portion of ”; onto stands for “to on”; with stands for “a means of changing something. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

126 " I promised you that the reason we are obsessing over locative constructions in a book about human nature is that it tells us things about the way humans think. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

127 " The dative is a pair of constructions, "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

128 " When one loads hay onto a wagon, it can be any amount, even a couple of pitchforkfuls. But when one loads the wagon with hay, the implication is that the wagon is full.36 This subtle difference, which linguists call the holism effect, can be seen with the other locative verbs: "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

129 " In traditional grammars the two phrases are called the indirect and direct objects; linguists today usually call them simply the “first object” and the “second object.” The term dative, by the way, has nothing to do with dates; it comes from the Latin word for “give. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

130 " First, the two constructions are more or less synonymous. Second, the alternation embraces not just one verb but many: "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

131 " A lot follows from the idea that the mind is a metaphor-monger. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

132 " Third, children do pick up the pattern. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

133 " Fourth—and here’s where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake.
*Goldie drove the lake her minibus. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

134 " Saying something to your child and then realizing that you sound like one of your own parents: deja vieux, mamamorphosis, mnemomic, patterfamilias, vox pop, nagativism, parentriloquism. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

135 " And fifth, the promiscuous verbs and monogamous verbs seem to convey the same kinds of meanings. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

136 " This one broaches the topic in still another way: what we can learn about our makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

137 " The concept of possession is something that we ordinarily apply only to animate beings. This immediately explains why some verbs refuse to enter the double-object construction "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

138 " According to Radical Pragmatics, a permanently existing conceptual structure underlying the meaning of a word is also as mythical as the Jack of Spades, because people can use a word to mean almost anything, depending on the context. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

139 " Polysemy refers to a word’s having a number of distinct but related senses, and is different from two other ways in which a sound can have multiple meanings. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

140 " It’s as if we think of ideas as things, knowing as having, communicating as sending, and language as the package. 52 This is sometimes called the conduit metaphor, and it can be seen in dozens of expressions for thinking, saying, and teaching. "

― Steven Pinker , The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature