An excellent book! Highly recommend! Adger introduces the central question of theories about linguistic structure, meaning, and use: how we learn and use it in our daily lives.

He breaks down the central properties of language and compares it with the para-linguistic (e.g. gestures) and the non-linguistic (animal communication).

The book comes at a pressing time. As artificial intelligence seems to be the pressing forward at breakneck pace, this book challenges thee notion that AI and AI-language are comparable with the language patterns, structure and learning which are uniquely human.

I've rarely met a language book I didn't like - I enjoyed reading this one. But in terms of what I learned from reading it, mainly it seemed to be a platform for the author's own theories of language use and evolution.

I managed to race through this engaging and informative work on the structure of language, before my daughter grabbed it from me. We have been debating the content ever since. Though she is immersed in the theory of language and I think adverbs are a linguistic counting system we were both able to access the concepts, reinforcing and challenging our understanding. For young parents the insight into how language is learnt are more valuable than anything you might read about Mozart in the womb or any hot-housing system. I wish I had read this fifteen years ago. Any parents of children with language difficulties will find this particularly interesting, though I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has ever found the use of language necessary.

Adger is a real expert in the field. A fabulous read!

Very comprehensive and readable book on syntax. The last part on Merge I confess I had some trouble understanding it. But otherwise I give the book a high rating.

Perhaps the thing to bear in mind about this book is that it is described as an 'introduction' into certain aspects of linguistics. This it does well, like a well-thrown pebble of enquiry that skips multiple times across the flat lake of language. In doing so, it dips into a number of topics, using references to many different languages to explain aspects about language structure and grammar. This aspect of the book is generally enjoyable.

These examples are meant to support the author's view, repeatedly expressed, that languages are governed by certain 'Universal Laws'. However, when it comes to delving into where such laws might come form or why they work the way they do, it frustratingly shies away, saying that this is "beyond this book". The penultimate chapter of the book then delves into an element of phrase structure theory called Merge, describing it later as an "engine" of the creativity of language, when as far I could understand it, Merge is more a model for trying to explain that creativity, not the cause of it. And some of the explanations and accompanying examples given in the presentation of Merge seemed unconvincing, even if perhaps they do reflect accepted theory in linguistics.

So, while some content is interesting, it does not feel particularly joined-up and the style of prose is wordy and repetitive, thereby sometimes defeating its possible aim to be clear and easy to understand. In the end, the book reads like a series of research papers stuck together or the attempt to turn a dissertation on linguistics into a book. Having read some good reviews of this book, perhaps I picked it up with too high, or the wrong, expectations. Either way, I ultimately found it a dissatisfying read.

I love it.