The Language Instinct
By Steven Pinker
* Publisher: Perennial (HarperCollins)
* Number Of Pages: 496
* Publication Date: 1995-02
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0060976519
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780060976514
* Binding: Paperback
Product Description:
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, well-known for his revolutionary theory of how children acquire language, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. With wit, education, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
Summary: A Thorough and Entertaining Introduction to Language
Rating: 5
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.
Summary: Great book
Rating: 5
I found this book to be an interesting and informative read. While I am interested in linguistics (and thus was probably a bit more excited about the topic than the average person), I think this book would also be enjoyable for anyone. Pinker writes in an understandable manner, mostly avoiding linguistic jargon and always explaining complex topics in a generally understandable way.
Additionally, the latest edition includes a " .S." addition at the end that incudes Q&A with Pinker as well as a summary for each chapter of new advances that have been made since the book was originally written--a nice addition to an already great book.
Summary: A fascinating, but somewhat thickly written story
Rating: 4
We all talk. (Some of us more than others). But all humans -- barring a problem such as deafness -- talk. Even our deaf friends talk by means of a complicated language of visual signs.
And Steven Pinker tells this story, the story of human language, and why it's so essential a part of our humanity, well. Following Chomsky, he posits a universal language structure, an innate part of our being who we are, and how small children grow quickly into complex grammatical and syntactical structures.
And for the most part, this is a good read. My only complaint is that on occasions, Dr. Pinker waxes a bit too eloquent, telling more information than is needed for the argument, giving pages and pages of examples when one or 2 would do. But this is a good introduction to the whole question of why and how we talk, and by inference how we think.
Summary: enjoyable
Rating: 4
i liked this book better than pinker's "how the mind works." it was a little more focused, obviously, and i feel that pinker had better explanations for his ideas re language and linguistics than for the mind as a whole (tho he did use examples from the "mind" book here, and vice versa). it got a little thick thru the parts discussing grammar rules, but on the whole a good read that kept my interest. less dense than "how the mind works" and on the whole more intriguing.
Summary: Just plain fun.
Rating: 5
I give this book five stars not because its reasoning is impeccable, or its writing everywhere beautiful, or its theme always engaging and irresistible. In none of these dimensions is it flawless. But I would nonetheless recommend it without reservation to all readers, so I feel I must give it five stars.
This book is great because of its fascinating subject, and the myriad of relevant ideas and examples it reveals. The book is more of in interesting discussion on a topic than an orderly defense of a thesis. But so many of the examples are utterly fascinating that, were there no attempt to patch them together into a single narrative, this book would still be intriguing and enjoyable. To give you a sense of why I love this book I must mention a few of these here.
Pinker discusses:
>how children, in a single generation, can transform a pidgin (an awkward combination of two languages created by the mingling of two populations with different native languages) into a creole (a composite language that is no longer awkward but instead melds the parent languages into a new one with all of the richness and complexity of any other natural language). He further describes how deaf children creolized artificially constructed sign languages into a natural language with all of the features and depth of expression that extant languages have.
>in depth, the concept that language defines the boundaries of thought and expression.
>how varieties of brain injuries and genetic mutations can alter very specific language abilities while leaving other general cognitive functioning unharmed.
>efforts to teach other animals language.
>how languages change over time and what rules the changes preserve and what aspects of language are up for grabs.
I will force myself to stop. As I flip through the pages of the book I find countless other examples and frequently get caught up in them all over again and have to tear myself away.
Now, I must warn you, that if you are not interested in theories of linguistics and cognition and computer science then there are, here and there, some more nuts and bolts discussions of how language works that you will find to be a bit dry. They're really not bad, and if you ARE interested in the above they're actually quite fascinating. But if you find your interest waning as you encounter these rougher patches, never fear, they are a relatively minor component of the book, and there are many more vigorous discussions yet to come.
If you are interested in language, how it works, how we learn it, and how it affects us, then you will love this book. I find Pinker's arguments in favor of the view that language is innate in humans to be compelling, and I think that most people would find the suggestion to be pretty intuitive. But don't let your feelings about the outcome of this argument obscure the many simpler pleasures available to the reader who innocently enjoys the many vistas afforded by this excellent tour of the world of linguistics. |
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