Steven Pinker on language and thought

Educação Superior::Linguística, Letras e Artes::LinguísticaThis video presents an exclusive preview of Steven Pinker's book: the stuff of thought. The author looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize. For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old one