语言和音乐是与人类生活和文化紧密相关的方面。尽管音乐和语言的雏形可能存在于其它物种，例如燕雀，这些能力的复杂性和多样性却是人类独有的。因此，人类的进化极有可能为我们的大脑配备了特别适合语言和音乐习得的神经基础结构。音乐、语言和脑之间的交界面正是Aniruddh Patel撰写的这本既精彩又博学的著作的核心。 本书对目前已知的音乐与语言和脑相关的实证研究作了最好、最全面的总结。Patel博士对音乐和语言在元素、节奏、旋律、句法和意义等不同层面进行比较，并以此作为全书章节的结构线索。在每一个层面，作者首先介绍这两个系统的表征形式及其相互间的差异。然后在看似不同的表征背后，阐明它们认知加工和神经过程的相关性或一致性，并继之给出心理学和认知神经科学研究的证据。如此结构和表述，既富有思想，又不乏情趣。最后一章论及音乐和语言的进化，对这两个系统的发生发展及其对人类群体内交流之不同作用进行了阐述，所论深刻而有见地。

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。