Review

I didn’t actually finish reading this. I had looked forward to it because I enjoy books about linguistics, but this just didn’t do it for me. In part I was turned off by her unnecessary (and unfactual) attacks on Chomsky’s personal style, but mostly it began to seem by about page 50 that there was not to be much more than unverifiable hypotheses and speculation on offer - which is not a criticism of the book, by any means, but a property of the subject matter. Anyway, if there were any scientifically plausible explanations of the origins of language in this book, the author ought to have given some hint early on.

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