The Stuff of Thought

Pinker’s fourth title in this collection, and the one that reads language for what it discloses about the mind behind it — verbs and their argument structures, metaphor, naming, swearing, innuendo and indirect speech. FIRST PUBLISHED 2007 BY VIKING PENGUIN; ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7; the number line reads 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2, a first printing. The permissions page acknowledges Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” and Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption. It stands at the end of the collection’s Pinker sequence, which begins with the technical Learnability and Cognition (1991) and ends here in general readership.