Words Don't Mean What They Mean

Here's a very interesting article in Time magazine: "Words Don't Mean What They Mean." It's an excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker.

The article explains that language isn't just about communicating information. When you speak to someone, you are assuming a certain degree of familiarity. So each sentence does two things at once: it not only conveys the message, but also continues to negotiate the relationship. This is why we're polite and say "Do you think you could pass the salt?" instead of "Gimme the salt." – the former is what linguists call "felicity conditions," so that you're making a request rather than giving a command. You're making your need known in a way that confirms to the listener that you know he's not a flunky.

A book review gives some examples that I think may explain some dyslexia. One example is the conversion of a sentence's construction from content-locative to container-locative. Either waym the two sentences mean the same thing, yet the resulting converted sentence is sometimes grammatically correct but not always. Here's an example of the conversion that works:

Jared sprayed water on the roses.
Jared sprayed the roses with water.

Here's an example where the same conversion doesn't work:

Hal poured water into the glass.
Hal poured the glass with water.

Why is the second sentence is the first example grammatically correct yet incorrect in the second example? How do children learn when the conversion can be applied and when it can't? The book explores how. I think this helps explain why English spelling, word tense, and sentence structure can be so darn difficult to learn.

So I haven't read the book, but it sounds interesting.