大象传媒

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of our ideas about the formation of language. The psychologist George Miller worked out that in English there are potentially a hundred million trillion sentences of twenty words in length - that鈥檚 a hundred times the number of seconds since the birth of the universe. 鈥淟anguage鈥�, as Chomsky put it, 鈥渕akes infinite use of finite media鈥�. 鈥淟anguage鈥�, as Steven Pinker puts it, 鈥渃omes so naturally to us that it鈥檚 easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is鈥�. 鈥淎ll over the world鈥�, he writes, 鈥渕embers of our species spend a good part of their lives fashioning their breath into hisses and hums and squeaks and pops and are listening to others do the same鈥�. Jean Jacques Rousseau once said that we differ from the animal kingdom in two main ways - the use of language and the prohibition of incest. Language and our ability to learn it has been held up traditionally as our species鈥� most remarkable achievement, marking us apart from the animals. But in the 20th century, our ideas about how language is formed are being radically challenged and altered. With Dr Jonathan Miller, medical doctor, performer, broadcaster, author and film and opera director; Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California.