"Baker's is the first book aimed at a general readership that outlines the nuts and bolts of one of the main courses of current linguistics training and research--what is called the 'Principles and Parameters' school."

--Books & Culture

"A welcome introduction to what many linguists are actually engaged in every day, helping to fill a glaring gap in the popular nonfiction literature."

--Books & Culture

"The Atoms of Language� is for linguistic heavy hitters, but his discussion of the Navajo 'code talkers' is an ear-opener."

--The New York Times

"A significant contribution to the field� Recommended for undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and general readers."

--Choice

"A unique and lucid treatment of the structure and diversity of language."

--C&RL News

Publisher Web Site, January, 2003

Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality--and thus mutual intelligibility--of human thought. We are now on the verge of solving this problem. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough both within linguistics, which will herewith finally become a full-fledged science, and in our understanding of the human mind.