The Twitter Machine: Reflections on Language

`It is a very elegant achievement. Each chapter carries the reader from simple, appealing examples that should arouse curiosity and surprise, not only to insights of some depth into language and psychology, but also to a sense of the nature of rational enquiry more generally, and to interesting thoughts about questions of much human significance. The presentation is lucid and well-argued, the selected materials, drawn from varied sources and fields, are pertinent and illuminating. It is popularization of science in the very best sense, a feat not easy to achieve. I read through it with pleasure and anticipation, and I expect that others will as well, over a wide range of backgrounds and familiarity with the topics addressed.' Noam Chomsky This unique book provides an introductory overview of modern theoretical linguistics which manages to be both accessible and humorous without sacrificing either scholarship or insight. In a series of magisterial vignettes Smith emphasizes the perennial necessity of appealing to linguistic theory if we are to gain any real understanding of the phenomena of language. However profound or however trivial the questions we raise and try to answer - what exactly does one have to know to count as a speaker of a language? What would it mean for a language to have no vowels? Why do little children call lorries `lollies'? Precisely what with this sentence is wrong? - we need recourse to a theory even to make them coherent. In particular, the author argues that we can find solutions to our puzzles, and explanations for these phenomena, if we exploit on the one hand Chomsky's theory of Generative Grammar, and on the other Sperber and Wilson's theory of Relevance. The issues discussed are drawn from an extremely wide range: not only from the linguist's daily fare of syntax and phonology, but also from the philosophy, psychology and even the politics of language. The examples and analyses used to illustrate these issues come from a comparably broad area, from `The Devil's Dictionary' to Shaw and Shakespeare; from Darwin's correspondence to Einstein's theory of relativity; from science fiction to science fact and the scienctific theory that linguistics is beginning to emulate.