Jeet Heer has mastered the art of confidently using pretentious words he doesn't understand, knowing that most people will be too intimidated to challenge him and risk looking stupid. But some of us know what gestalt means, and that ain't it.
Most of Pinker later work is bad but Language Instinct is a good popular introduction to linguistic, endorsed by no less than Noam Chomsky.
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Pinker's book is not that good & shows the same bad habits that can be found in his later work; his discussion of Whorf, for example, is at best disingenuous & his handling of Whorf's linguistic examples is embarrassingly bad (almost as if he'd never read Whorf)
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On a more positive note, I would recommend Nick Evans's Dying Words, which is a much better introduction to linguisticshttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444310450 …
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