This guy is very clever. He is even cleverer at explaining the clever things he thinks about in such a clever way that you don't need to be nearly as clever as him to get to drips with them.

I confess to getting completely lost in the grammar discussions and skipping forwards a little. But even then I found the rest of the book very rewarding indeed.

The main reason I like this chaps books is because they are all about me.

They are about you as well, so go and read them now.

Beautifully written with a naughty sense of humour and one hell of a profound message. ( )

A three-year-old toddler is "a grammatical genius"--master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language. To Pinker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psycholinguist, the explanation for this miracle is that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly "hard-wired" into the brain and partly learned. In this exciting synthesis--an entertaining, totally accessible study that will regale language lovers and challenge professionals in many disciplines--Pinker builds a bridge between "innatists" like MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who hold that infants are biologically programmed for language, and "social interactionists" who contend that they acquire it largely from the environment. If Pinker is right, the origins of language go much further back than 30,000 years ago (the date most commonly given in textbooks)--perhaps to Homo habilis , who lived 2.5 million years ago, or even eons earlier. Peppered with mind-stretching language exercises, the narrative first unravels how babies learn to talk and how people make sense of speech. Professor and co-director of MIT's Center for Cognitive Science, Pinker demolishes linguistic determinism, which holds that differences among languages cause marked differences in the thoughts of their speakers. He then follows neurolinguists in their quest for language centers in the brain and for genes that might help build brain circuits controlling grammar and speech. Pinker also argues that claims for chimpanzees' acquisition of language (via symbols or American Sign Language) are vastly exaggerated and rest on skimpy data. Finally, he takes delightful swipes at "language mavens" like William Safire and Richard Lederer, accusing them of rigidity and of grossly underestimating the average person's language skills. Pinker's book is a beautiful hymn to the infinite creative potential of language. Newbridge Book Clubs main selection; BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

Cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker presents a compelling argument for the existence of a language instinct in humans. Pinker relies heavily on the shoulders of Noam Chomsky, whose theories of language, especially Universal Grammar, revolutionized thinking about the ways in which humans learn to convey thoughts vocally via grammar and symbolism. Pinker's thesis is backed up by numerous studies and decades of research from many disciplines.

The book starts by laying out the argument that there exists an instinct derived through evolutionary natural selection which predisposes humans to acquire and utilize vocalized language. Pinker uses a myriad of studies as well as anecodotal accounts which illustrate the ways in which this process works well, works poorly, or is hindered following accidents and brain disorders.

A bit of a dry section follows as Pinker gets into an advanced discussion of grammar and how the brain may decide how to structure sentences. While many readers while feel their eyes grow fuzzy through these three or so chapters, the section lays the ground work for many of the remaining chapters. Pinker shows that complex language constructions, including the irregular nature of many English verbs and constructs, can be simplified into a few very basic rules and procedures which we understand as basic grammar.

From there, Pinker describes work on language itself, including the meanings and utilization of words, the similarities and diversities of languages, and the nature of baby talk. The rest of the book offers the reader the closing arguments as Pinker describes the biology behind his theory, including how genes might control the language instinct, and how natural selection may have acted upon genetic variety. The last two chapters deal with 'grammar police' (called 'Language Mavens' by Pinker) and the polishing of the main thesis with a chapter titled 'Mind Design.'

I loved the entire book, even the somewhat dry grammar chapters. I know some readers will not make it past that part, and it is understandable since it is dense and deals with a subject most of us hated in school. However, The Language Instinct stands as an amazing argument in favor of a genetic basis for the nature of language and for the ability of very young children to acquire and thrive with a few inate grammatical concepts. Recommended for anyone interested in psychology, linguistics, brain and mind, education, or philosophy of science. Four and one-half stars. ( )

Helped me to understand how language is learned and in this sense has been very helpful in my teaching of ESL students. A bit complex, but worth the time spent to read and understand it. The benefit is in understanding. You have to find your own way to apply it. But unlike many book on educational pedogogy, it's real and it's useful. ( )

Not Read

I greatly enjoyed this book, and read all but the last quarter of the last chapter about 5 years ago, maybe more. I set it down, and never finished it. I came across it again in the book case, started at the bookmark, and finished it. I know I never counted it in any of my yearly book lists, though it has influenced my thought since I started reading it.

His thesis is that the mind has an instinct for language - that we are Not a blank slate when we are born. The mind makes certain assumptions about patterns, and what patterns are meaningful. He does this by looking at commonalities across languages, experiments in (and humor created to show) how people use words, and studies of how children acquire their native language. Pinker is a Darwinist, so he examines how this instinct could have been selected for, evolutionarily.

His writing style is readable and clear, but on the dry side. He leavens it with humor, but still it takes some effort to get through. Here is one example, from the book opened at random: "To become speakers, children cannot just memorize; they must leap into the linguistic unknown and generalize to an infinite world of as-yet-unspoken sentences. But there are untold numbers of seductive false leaps: Mind -> minded, but not Find -> finded," and he goes on with more examples (found on page 281). Another example from p. 85: "The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar)." Then he goes on to discuss the examples that support this thesis.

But for anyone interested in language, linguistics, and how the mind works, Steven Pinker's books are all essential reading. Just give yourself the time. They are not a quick read. There is much to chew on here. ( )

It took me 7 weeks to get through this - very interesting in parts, esp. the last quarter which I got through in two or three days, but very dry and technical in others, where I would just be reading a few pages a couple of times a week. I mostly accept the author's theory of the language instinct and a universal grammar underlying all languages, though perhaps he overstates it in parts. He is good at debunking linguistic pedants (mavens) and those who romanticise "talking" chimpanzees. ( )

I had a hard time with this book. When I started it, I was excited because the introduction was really good and it looked like the rest of the book would be also. But it soon got very technical and dull. Then it would get more interesting again. Then it would be very hard to read and understand. Then we'd have several pages of diagrams and obscure notation.

I don't really know how to rate this book. The basic idea is that language is a human instinct, and that language is acquired naturally. I understood a lot of his examples and some of what he said made sense. But I was frankly lost a lot of the time. I did study linguistics at least a little back in college, but that was not much help here.

I would say if you are interested in the subject, it might be worth a try, but it's certainly not for everyone. ( )

I don't much care for Pinker and find it daunting that he's somehow attained "celebrity" status in cognitive science. Was it with books like this that he did so? This basically reads like an extended defense of Chomsky's universal grammar (UG) and Fodor's language of thought (LOT) hypothesis (perhaps not surprising--Pinker's name often comes up when a discussion of "mentalese" is at hand). A great deal of it is vacuous and it affords criticisms of UG and LOT barely a nod. Overall, lazy and predictable.

Oh, and the jokes aren't funny. ( )

Steven Pinker lost me as a buyer of his thesis with the very second sentence of his book:

"For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in other's brains with exquisite precision".

It you take that for granted, Pinker's book will seem compelling and not especially controversial. Steven Pinker clearly takes it for granted, perhaps because he can't conceive of how we could possibly communicate effectively and coherently if it were not true.

Consider the following, which I think perfectly encapsulates the world view Pinker can't conceive of, by Ogden Nash:

Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.

We'd free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.

To my way of thinking, it is the very fact that we *can't* "shape events in other's brains with exquisite precision" - or with any reliable certainty at all, that describes the human condition. The frisson created by precisely that ambiguity underpins all communication; it is the source of irony, tragedy, comedy, invention and imagination. Any theory of language which denies that fundamental contingency of human communication (as this one does) is going to have to prove it, and displacing that onus is a heavy task indeed.

Pinker's psycho-linguistics makes precisely that denial, by holding that all human communication - every language - shares an inate, evolutionary programmed Universal Grammar, precisely because Pinker can't conceive how else human communication could be possible.

I'm no academic, and certainly I have no background in linguistics. Given that this theory - which is from the same tradition as Noam Chomsky's - has been the ascendancy amongst academic linguistics for the best part of the last thirty years, Steven Pinker being one of the leading "normal scientists" within the paradigm (if I should be so bold as to use that word), and that The Language Instinct is considered fairly widely to be his magnum opus, I was expecting to have my naive relativistic assumptions carefully and systematically dissected, then annihilated, one by one.

So imagine my surprise to find that in the place of carefully drawn arguments and compelling statistical data, one finds a tissue of anecdotal arguments carefully selected to fit the theory, arguments from authority ("Chomsky is one of the ten most cited writers in all of the humanities"), dubious suppositions in place of statistical data (the "it is difficult to imagine the following grammatical construction being used" sort of thing), begged questions, non sequiturs, and Roger Penrose-style irrelevant scientific waffle - especially as regards evolution - and a decided absence of any consideration of competing theories of linguistics - and straw men versions of those which do rate a mentioned.

In short, Steven Pinker employs just about every illegitimate arguing technique in the book. His theory completely fails to account for metaphor (metaphor is barely mentioned in the book), nor the incremental development of language, the evolution of different languages with different grammars and vocabularies. At times Pinker is forced to argue that the grammar of our language is sometimes different from the words we actually speak and write, containing unspoken "inaudible symbols" representing a word or phrase which has been moved elsewhere in the sentence, so the sentence "The car was put in the garage", according to Pinker's Universal Grammar should technically be rendered as: "was put the car in the garage", and the construction we use can only be explained by movement of "The car" and the insertion in its place of an inaudible "trace":

"[The car] was put [trace] in the garage".

Now, again I am no technical linguist, but this has all the hallmarks of pure bull manure to me.

Finally, Pinker is at pains to point out that Universal Grammar is only ever applicable to oral language: written language didn't arise for centuries after oral grammar "evolved" as a phenotype.

But this hardly helps Pinker, since (as he himself points out, with reference to a transcript of the Watergate Tapes) when people talk in ordinary conversation they almost *never* use complete grammatical sentences: they interrupt themselves, they rely on physical gestures, they break off in mid stream and start a new thought, they don't punctuate (there's no unequivocal punctuation in spoken English), all the time.

As is fashionable amongst the "reductivist" and "evolutionary" set these days (a set I would otherwise, in general terms, consider myself in agreement with), relativist arguments are scorned. But Pinker's paradigm implies that, provided we are competent in constructing our own sentences, we should all understand each other perfectly, all the time: there should be no ambiguity; no room for miscontrual; no possibility for evolution in ideas or language. It is difficult to see how anyone could believe such a thing. But neither the structure of language and grammar nor its practical use needs to be perfect for effective communication *at some level* to be possible, and surely that is all that is needed. The beauty of the contingent view of language, which Pinker seems unable to appreciate, is how it can account for the missed margin of communication which might explain the everyday cultural and interpretative problems we all face, and the figurative and metaphorical power we all find at our disposal. Ogden Nash's dilemma is our dilemma, however much Steven Pinker might wish it were otherwise.

An earlier reviewer has mentioned Geoffrey Sampson's "the Language Instinct Debate" as a compelling antidote to Pinker's world view. Having recently read it (on the strength of that recommendation), I would firmly agree. In perhaps an ill-advisedly grumpy tone, Sampson - whose position at the University of Sussex inevitably means his academic profile is lower than Pinker's or Chomsky's - systematically and convincingly annihilates many of the arguments (such as they are) in Pinker's work. ( )

my review ( )

Steven Pinker's work is fifteen or so years old, but it feels fresh and vital and very, very necessary. Pinker makes a compelling case for there being a true, hereditable, evolved language centre in the brain, and he gives many, many examples of how this could work, and why it is probably true. 'The Language Instinct' is an excellent introduction to the science of biological linguistics; should I take my studies in this area no further, I will at least know now a lot more about this fascinating topic than I did before. ( )

http://tristram.squarespace.com/... ( )

This book is marred by several major weaknesses, some of them endemic to the genre, and some of them indicative of the wider problems in linguistics.

In popular science books, in order to make the science accessible and interesting to the lay reader, the rigour of the science must often be glossed over. It gives one the impression often that the point has been won by rhetoric, rather than logic or argument; a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, with a well placed joke, or a well chosen example. Pinker is excellent at making the science accessible, but one wonders what caveats and controversies are being left out. The chapters on phonology, syntax, morphology and the evolution of language are very well done, with a potentially boring subject made interesting. There is also very good stuff on the brain, with descriptions of fascinating case studies of various different kinds of aphasias. While his overall thesis is absolutely correct -that language is an instinct (well, of course it is, duh)- the way Pinker goes about persuading us to accept his thesis, and the arguments he uses to do so are not as uncontroversial or as simplistic or as clear cut as he presents them. The book is subtitled: "How the mind produces language". But the fact is, no one really knows how the mind produces language. We only have hypotheses which can be disproved or proved by various experiments, and both the hypotheses and experiments are hotly contested by those who have vested interests in creating and pursuing those controversies, i.e. academic linguists...

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2007/0... ( )

As clear and entertaining a work of non-fiction as anyone could hope for. This explanation of how we acquire and employ language could be a required text for science and humanities students alike, but you can also read it on the beach.
-- James

This book was my introduction to Steven Pinker. It was a textbook for an introductory class on linguistics. I hadn't had any previous experience, so parts of the book were a bit slow-going, I enjoyed Pinker's style and ideas enough to purchase several more of his books. ( )

This is actually my copy from when I was studying Cog Sci in school, finally returned to me. Maybe I'll finish it, this time.

In this highly praised book, the author covers a lot of ground on how language was created and constructed, how it is learnt and how it evolves. The author argues that language is a human instinct hard-wired in our brains. Frankly, I found this book tough to read for very scientific and sometimes dry. It is an interesting technical subject but I miss the sociolinguistic aspect of it – communities speaking languages over time, imagining a human context. The book is still on my shelf, perhaps I should read it again. ( )

If you only ever read one book about the science of language, make it this one. Drawing on the imagery of the computer age, Steven Pinker makes a powerful case for the idea that we are born with language skills etched in the hard drive of our brains. ( )

Supposedly the "classic" linguistics book now, it was published *after* I got my BA in Linguistics. So, a very enjoyable currently-reading book... more review later

Fun and interesting look at how language develops. Pinker's speculations are not always convincing, but they're usually entertaining and educational. Lots of Chomsky. ( )

Pinker is a wonderful writer, and I enjoyed this book almost as much for the writing as the content (which was extremely stimulating). He makes a very convincing case, especially so if you don't know much about linguistics (I didn't). After reading this I went on to read other books on "mentalese" (aka "the language of thought"), and found that Pinker's position is pretty controversial and probably on the decline. I don't know how much of the rest of the book is like this, but it's worth reading, regardless. ( )

This is the most delightful book written by the amazing and brilliant Steven Pinker. It covers the nature of human language from the most modern perspective. It is also a thoroughly delightful read for anyone with any interest in this area. ( )