Remarkable insights into how we acquire language
Most of us don't give much thought to the deep structures of the language we use every day, or how we develop such a marvellous tool. We just speak. We may marvel at the speed and ease with which babies acquire language. We may idly wonder about other languages when visiting some exotic country.
"The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker is a useful book for readers who are curious about language. Pinker explains recent discoveries in linguistic theory and discusses such things as language genes and signing chimps.
He also answers some common questions, such as why there are so many languages, why they are so hard for adults to learn and why no one seems to know the plural of "Walkman".
Pinker's central theme is that language is an instinct like many other instincts; it is not a purely cultural invention. Pinker is not the first to suggest this. Darwin also put forward a similar idea. However, the most famous proponent of a language instinct is Noam Chomsky, who is mostly responsible for the modern revolution in linguistic theory.
While the idea of an instinct for language might be jarring to many of us, it does not mean that we are all automatons. In fact some sort of instinct for language is obvious when we think about it. Language is highly logical, even the "ungrammatical" argot of street gangs, pidgins and creoles.
We don't learn to reason from a book, we just "do" it. Reasoning/logic is an intrinsic part of human thought, so obviously our brain has some sort of organisation that produces the ability to reason. Logic is not some innate property of the universe - it is a product of the mind that has evolved because it is incredibly useful to making sense of the world and for planning. Why not language as well?
Until recently, there was no sign language in Nicaragua. In 1979 the first schools for deaf children were set up. Children started to invent their own sign system in playgrounds and on the buses. Gradually, their original "pidgin" sign language developed its own grammar ad spread to other deaf children. Today it is recognised as a fully functional sign language. This is only one remarkable example of our innate capacity for language.
Creoles and pidgins that emerge when two language groups come into contact provide other evidence of the mutability of language. Even single languages are remarkably fluid. This is not apparent in the lifetime of a single individual, apart from the introduction of new words (eg "email") or new meanings for existing words (eg "gay"), but over decades or centuries remarkable changes can occur. The English of Shakespeare is comprehensible, although a little odd, to most people; but the English of Chaucer is virtually incomprehensible to all but scholars.
Pinker discusses many other remarkable cases of language acquisition, especially in children. Children go through very specific stages of language acquisition in their early years. These stages, and how they occur, teach us a great deal about language in general.
He also discusses recent insights into language derived from studies of people who develop highly idiosyncratic language defects following injury to specific parts of the brain. Such studies are especially useful because the brain is largely an invisible "blob." It is not like, say, a dog. We can see that dogs have tails, fur, teeth etc, but we can't see the subtle structures of the brain, so it is hard to intuitively figure out how language works in terms of the detailed structures of the brain and how it might have arisen.
Pinker inevitably has to grapple with the technical jargon of formal linguistics in presenting his arguments. There are many Chomskian linguistic diagrams in the book that can be a little daunting to non-linguists. While the more technical explanations require close attention from the non-specialist reader at times, the book is by no means difficult for general readers.
The Chapter on "The Language Mavens" is a self-indulgent parody of various "language police" and is unworthy of the book. Pinker takes gratuitous shots at people who may be pedants when it comes to preserving formal aspects of language and spelling, but who nevertheless perform a useful service in drawing attention to the "proper" use of their language. Why devote a whole chapter to poking fun at them?
But that is a minor quibble. Pinker's book gave me wonderful insights into the language I love, English. The other day while out walking, I heard a young boy of about 5 or 6 say to his Dad "I want to walk fastly." Pinker's book explains why he made that specific error, and what it says about how we acquire the logic of language and of its irregular constructions.
The Language Instinct
The book is very interesting and well written. Steven Pinker is an excellent writer. I am enjoying the book very much.
Maximum Infotainment Per Kilogram
How many books have I read in six decades? Certainly more than a thousand. "The Language Instinct" is among my favorite half dozen.
I have taken my copy on many trips including fifty mile back-packing trips where it served as the only written entertainment.
My figure of merit for books is infotainment per kilogram (this is pre-Kindle). (My copy is the original 13 oz Harper Edition from 1995.)
Another figure of merit is number of re-reads. The book succeeds on both accounts.
Overwhelmed by the mastery and devotion to detail that Steve Pinker took in writing this, I then heard him speak a few times in California,
was motivated to hear him lecture in London, and finally heard him lecture and interviewed him on a week long trip last year to the Amazon
(detailed at my website (Google "Bob Blum" ). This was the book that rightly catapulted Pinker to fame as an a-list expositor of science along with Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennett.
While the thesis of the book - language is elaborately built into the hardware - is undoubtedly controversial, the non-specialist
can comfortably ignore the minutia of the debate and instead bask in Pinker's erudition and exposition. While the experts are debating
the fine points of neurolinguistics, the rest of us get to enjoy a masterful and delightful presentation of how language works. I have read all of Pinker's works. This is still my favorite.
Interesting Book:
I have to say, I really did like Pinker's book. This book the first of its kind that I have ever read so it may not be right for me to comment. However, I found the subject of language acquisition intriguing. Interesting case studies were revealed, however, I would say that maybe too many cases were offered. The writing style is extremely clear and it is a bit humorous. Toward 3/4 through the book, I began to get a little bored, but, again, I must admit that it is mostly because I did not understand the information that he was communicating. (Like I said, I have never read a book like this before.) Particularly interesting was the chapter on the Big Bang theory and how internal grammar structures within an individual can be harmonized with Darwinian evolution. This I found most interesting. However, in my opinion, Pinker did not answer this harmonization with a definite appeal to serious questions raised. It may be the case that I just did not understand what Pinker was implying, but as far as I'm concerned, only half of the questions raised in my head were answered. However, all in all, I found this book to be a helpful started in this area of study. Pinker uses an array of sources and draws from interesting material. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the complexity of language formulation and internal cognitive processes which affect language.
A Thorough and Entertaining Introduction to Language
As someone who has had a fascination about languages, this book was the perfect choice for my undergraduate neuroscience class--it's objective is to elucidate how the mind creates language. The prose is extremely well-written and complex ideas clearly explained. Pinker takes the reader on a very fun and thought-provoking journey, providing fascinating insights for both the casually-interested reader and linguists alike. I will highlight on some key points presented throughout.
The first sections illustrate the key themes that Pinker will elaborate on throughout the rest of the book. He presents language as being an evolutionary adaptation that is unique to humans, just as much as a trunk is an adaptation for elephants or sonar for a bat. It is an instinct that we innately are born with. One of the myths about language is the notion that language is taught or transmitted, whether from mother to baby, or from one civilization to another. In actuality, children seem to be born with "Universal Grammar," a blueprint for all grammars on earth. "Virtually every sentence is a brand new combination of words. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words (9)." Likewise, there has yet to be a civilization found that is devoid of language. For example, a group of a million people had inhabited an area isolated from the rest of the world in New Guinea for forty thousand years, yet had independently developed their own language, as discovered when first contact was made in the 1920s.
Another important concept presented is "mentalese", a euphemism for a theory of thinking known as "computational/representational theory of mind." It essentially negates the common myth that thought is dependent on language and its corollary, that since people of different backgrounds than us have different languages, they must think differently. There is thought to be a universal "mentalese," and to "know a language" is simply being able to translate mentalese into strings of words in that language.
The second section of the book is a comprehensive summary of the basic parts of language, with plentiful information regarding syntax, phrase structure, morphemes, and more. A key point made is the recent discovery of a common anatomy in all the world's languages, called "X-bar theory." With the general set of rules, children do not have to "learn" lists and lists of rules for each language via rote memorization, but are born knowing the linguistic framework. They are then able to go from speaking a few isolated words to complex yet grammatically coherent sentences in a matter of months.
In the next section, Pinker introduces the concept of the "parser", which is the mental program that analyzes sentence structure during language comprehension. Grammar is simply a protocol, which does not necessitate understanding. In a nutshell, as the person reads a sentence, the parser will group phrases, building "phrase trees", consistent with linguistic rules (for example, a noun phrase is followed by a verb phrase). It is interesting that grammatically correct yet poorly constructed sentences can cause a person great difficulty in comprehension--the rationale is that the parser will not present the person with the correct phrase tree, among copious possible combinations.
Pinker goes on to describe the differences between languages. Despite grammatical difference between languages, such as subject(S)/verb(V)/object(O) order (SVO, SOV, etc), fixed-word-order/free-word-order (if phrase order can vary or not), there are striking similarities. The most prominent are implications--if a language has X, it will have Y. For example, if the basic order of a language is SOV, it will have question words at the beginning of the sentence (234).
Pinker cites three processes that act on languages that result in the differences that we see evident in languages today: innovation, learning, and migration. For example in the case of migration, though the roots of English are from Northern Germany, the existence of thousands of French words in English is the legacy of the invasion of Britain by the Normans in 1066. One of the most broad-reaching relationships between current modern languages can be traced back to the possible existence of a proto-Indo-European language, whose modern-day descendents span from Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent.
Over the final chapters, Pinker elaborates on the amazing explosion of language acquisition in children during their first three years. He explains the significance of Broca's and Wernicke's in language, by examining different cases of aphasia with patients having damage to those areas. Our current understanding of the brain does not allow us to be able to predict what the impact of damage to these areas are from patient to patient--it is frequently witnessed that patients with damage in identical places to these areas have different types of aphasia.
As a final note, Pinker makes a distinction between prescriptive rules, such as grammatical rules that we are taught in school, and descriptive rules, the way people actually talk. In response to the former, he makes a claim that using non-standard English such as "I can't get no satisfaction" versus the standard English "I can't get any satisfaction" is not wrong linguistically, as it is simply a different dialect with an internally consistent grammar. The evident double-negative (which is "wrong" in standard English) is simply a remnant of Middle English, where double-negatives were ubiquitous. As long as the grammatical rules of any language are consistent and systematic, as in the seemingly wrong non-standard English, they follow the descriptive rules and are linguistically correct.
Overall, The Language Instinct is a great read for anyone even remotely interested in the topic. The scope is immense, from basic linguistics, to language development, to language evolution, to genetics, to overall mind design. In addition to being introduced to very important linguistic concepts, you will have an amazing amount of entertaining examples to share in any setting.
