The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) | Steven Pinker

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) | Steven Pinker | It will open your mind to language and linguistics!

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The Language Insti...

	The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) Steven Pinker Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 110 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

EXTRAORDINARY WORK

Stephen Pinker's revolutionary work and the resultant writings stand at the precipice of a new era of understanding into the marvels of being human and what it is that makes us "us". This work, and his most recent ("The Blank Slate") will one day be held out as the first tentative baby steps toward what will certainly be our greater unlocking of the secrets of the brain.

What really makes Pinker's work accessible is his breezy tone (and I mean that as a complement). Many great scientists are good researchers but very poor writers. Pinker, on the other hand, knows how to communicate his ideas in a facile and utile manner, allowing even those without a Ph.D. to quickly and effectively grasp his many cogent points and references. By choosing not to talk down to, or over the heads of his readers, Pinker assures that more and more people will be drawn into his world of grand paradigm-shattering concepts and will grow to marvel and appreciate all that makes us who we are.

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It will open your mind to language and linguistics!

This is a wonderful book on the linguistics; but it doesn't stop there. It puts language and its function into the context of human nature and human development. You come away with an understanding of WHY language is so important in the history of humanity.

I have often recommended this book to my students as a supplement to my textbook, A Concise Introduction to Linguistics (Bruce M. Rowe and Diane P. Levine)

Read it, but read it critically

Addressing as it does issues of cognition, language usage and acquisition, evolutionary biology and innate versus learned behavior, this work is relevant to many of the great intellectual debates of our time. It is very readable for the most part, although if some of the topics are new to you then you will find a few sections rather heavy going. More illustrations would have helped here. There are syntax structure diagrams and one very grudging, cursory sketch of the language centers of the brain, but many sections cry out for a diagram among all the verbiage.

Pinker's lively, humorous style is often commented on but I sometimes found it wearing. He will illustrate a point with an amusing newspaper cutting, then list a few more, then add "I could not resist some more..." and so on. I sometimes wished he would just get on with it.

A major problem with his nativist approach, which other reviewers have commented on, is that many examples he lists of usages that English speakers would never employ are nothing of the kind. Most of them are conceivable and since the first publication of this book, linguists have been busy recording them in the field. The thesis also becomes somewhat unraveled in the penultimate chapter, where he argues that 'you and I' and 'you and me' are equally correct in all circumstances, because 'the pronoun is free to have any case it wants'. But if this is so then what has become of the innate awareness of correct usage that the whole theory is about? If 'between you and I' sounds instinctively wrong to me and 'between you and me' sounds instinctively wrong to someone else, does that mean one of us has a mutant grammar gene? I doubt it.

The title itself is problematic. 'Instinct' is not a word much in favor among biologists nowadays and whatever language is, it is certainly not instinctive in the traditional sense. Early in the book, Pinker admits as much, but determines to use the word anyway, a use that owes more to marketing than to science.

Still, this is probably the best introductory linguistics text currently available. If you are new to linguistics, start here rather than with Chomsky, but please go on to read Geoffrey Sampson's work, perhaps starting with his website, to get an alternative view. As with most academic disputes, the answer no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. Since Chomsky's early work, the nativists have toned down their claims considerably, while their opponents have made concessions. On page 34 of this book, Pinker says, "No one has yet located a language organ or a grammar gene, but the search is on." More than a decade later, the search is still on. Good luck with that.

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Good popular science review of human language

There many good things about this book: it is readable by the non-expert, it is probably the best popular science introduction to language and it contains many valid arguments. However, the book is too verbose, contains too much detail and suffers from lack of pace. Pinker can be obstinate in his arguments which is not necessarily bad. My favorite: Pinker attacks the belief that "people think using words" only to conclude that sometimes people do think using words. The book also lacks a comprehensive discussion on quantitative approaches for language modeling. This was acceptable in 1995 but not today. It is high time to re-write this book!
ps The definition of a Markov model and a finite state machine in the glossary will make many scientists frown.

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Sweeping overview of the science of language

The last 30 years have been a particularly fertile time for scientists working to uncover the mysteries of cognition in general and language in particular. Steven Pinker's book is a good overview of the field. Like the field itself, he attacks the subject matter from many different points of view: from the psychologist studying young children to the computer scientist building neural network models of speech, from the evolutionary biologist trying to understand the origins of language to the linguist looking for similarities across all spoken languages.

As someone who studied cognitive science in college, I wish a wide-ranging synthesis like this had been available to help me see the forest for the trees.

Let the reader be warned, however, that Mr. Pinker has strongly held opinions about certain areas of research (e.g., natural selection is the best possible explanation for how the language instinct came to be, language must be an instinct). This is not a problem with the book, but it does disqualify it from being an impartial introduction to the science of language.

Mr. Pinker obviously knows his stuff, but his occasionally wordy style can sometimes get in the way of clarity. All in all, though, this is well worth a read if you're curious about topics such as why most people pick up language easily early in life but with great difficulty later in life; why even deaf kids sign "hold you" when they me "hold me"; and how many words the Eskimos really have for "snow" (it's not as many as you think).

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