In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Grammaticalization, the process of converting regular lexical items and structures into conventionally interpreted grammatical morphemes, has traditionally been perceived as a syntactic or morphological process. Presenting a wealth of evidence from African languages, the authors argue that the development of grammatical categories is in fact strongly influenced by pragmatic and cognitive forces, factors that are located outside the confines of language structure. They discuss previous models and relate grammaticalization studies to alternative approaches such as localism and natural grammar theory. This volume challenges theories which describe language as a static system, as well as those which assume that linguistic categorization is based on discrete morpheme types, word classes, or sentence constituents. In contrast, the book's central argument is that both language structure and language use are dynamic phenomena and that linguistic behavior is essentially a creative activity. That creativity manifests itself, for example, in conceptual transfer leading to the encoding of more abstract concepts and of grammatical categories. Another key element of this theory is captured in the term "grammaticalization chain," which refers to a specific kind of linguistic category which cuts across morpheme types and word classes and has both a synchronic and diachronic dimension.

作者当初写作《殷周金文集成引得》，就是为这部书做铺垫和准备，可以说这部书是作者毕生学术研究的心血结晶。可惜的是，未及完成，作者就因病去世，留下近百万字的遗作。此书每字上列楷书，下列金文字形；疏证部分，先引《说文》，再引先秦文献，讲文字孳乳，分析字形演变，最后罗列该字用法。既有作者的研究心得和创见，亦提现了学界研究成果，对相关研究很有帮助。

《文史知识文库典藏本:汉语音韵》从语音学、文字学、汉语史等不同角度，全面而系统地阐述了汉语音韵的科学内涵及发展轨迹，为我们今天了解今音与古音之异同、今韵与古韵之区别，提供了可靠依据，向为学界所推崇，一些大专院校中文系，甚至将其列为教材。希望此书能够沟通古今，使读者对汉语音韵学能够得到比较全面的基础知识。