How the Mind Creates Language (Penguin Science) - The Language Instinct

Perhaps linguists consider this review's title a hyperbole, but for a CS major and popular science buff like me, this book was the most entertaining, interesting and informative pop sci book I've ever read.-

This is an easy read about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, that the language we speak affects the way we view the world (very roughly speaking). But it touches not at all on the spectacular SWH of the 50s, that different languages imposed different metaphysics (roughly again), and restricts itself lab-testable trivia, of a sort earlier thinkers would not have considered even relevant (how different color word minutely affect the speed of color recognition, say -- the big experimental result). This emphasis on vocabulary and the like rather than grammatical categories, the focus of earlier work -- and, admittedly much harder to devise tests for, means that little attention is paid to the major theoretical objections to SWH, the claim that all languages have the same underlying structure, however various the surface presentation. As a result, SWH is reduced to something akin the Eskimo words for snow canard and the more interesting topics, left undealt with, remain to cast doubt on the over all thesis. But a good read, as far as it goes.

Author maintains that the language is an instinct which I cannot agree with. Spoken language is only a potentiality which will not appear and develope if not immersed in a culture. It is physiology, not ideology like the author's position, which is deeply rooted in Marxism.

In reviewing Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, I do not give this work the highest ranking, nor the lowest, but the most average, not because I want to discourage its reading but because I want it read as I read, critically.
I approach the book from the perspective of that large community of people who seek to learn a second language as adults. The whole focus of Chomsky, and also of Pinker as his inept disciple, is elsewhere, on the initial acquisition (as opposed to learning) of language. Chomsky actually says very little about “the language instinct” per se. He says that language is innate and complex, and beyond that remains deeply skeptical regarding most of what is said of language. As a consummate scientist, Chomsky is cautious and self-critical, not, like Pinker, inclined to undisciplined pseudo-scientific speculation. There is a fine line between saying that language need not be laboriously taught to children because they are inclined to learn language at the proper time, and saying that adults need not bother trying to learn because when they are over four years old they are already too old.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not accusing Professor Pinker of discouraging adult language education, only suggesting that there is an urgent need for ESL and a real unaddressed danger that this book will be misunderstood as essentially anti-grammatical. Other teachers have often tried to persuade me that we should not waste time trying to teach grammar because it bores the students, but strangely my students seem more grateful than bored. In any case, when it is boring it is boring for a reason, which I make a point of explaining to the class. The grammar of your first language may seem boring because you think you know it, but you must be sure you know it well because only then can it becomes the basis for acquiring a different language. Perhaps I am over-sensitive, but Professor Pinker does seem insensitive to the needs of language learners, and that insensitivity in the context of virulent opposition to the immigrant community seems to me the pedagogical equivalent of collateral damage.
I disagree with most of the reviews I have read of this work, to the extent they have any substance at all. Most of the positive evaluations say that Pinker is entertaining, and many say that he helps us better understand Chomsky. I contend that neither is substantively true. Regarding the latter, Pinker offers nothing on Chomsky beyond taking the weakest link in Chomsky's science and treating it as absolute dogma. As for being entertaining, this subjective assessment is irrelevant to the subject at hand. If there were a Guinness prize for the largest collection of ambiguous absurdities in a single volume The Language Instinct would be a contender, and if you find this entertaining you have my condolences. Many examples of ambiguous absurdities can be found on the internet, and most of these are recycled by Pinker for our amusement. I find it more tedious than entertaining, and must observe that no effort is made to treat ambiguity as a problem or to suggest ways that the problem might be avoided. To mention a single example, used more than once by Pinker, the ambiguity in the expression “Dr. Ruth talks about sex with Dick Cavett,” is the simple result of misplacing a prepositional phrase, simply resolved by moving that phrase to the correct position, thus “talks with Dick Cavett about sex” is not ambiguous, and is therefore more correct usage. This ambiguity could be seized as an opportunity for teaching improved usage. Pinker's failure to use his own data to draw relevant and obvious observations that could actually inform us of something useful is a major defect of the book. Rather than entertaining, then, I would characterize Pinker as misleading and obsessively cute, to the detriment of his entire argument.

If third person singular is so easy a child can do it, why does it still confuse Steven Pinker?
Much of the discussion of what Chomsky now calls “generative grammar” focuses on the enduring mystery of early language acquisition. It is indeed a remarkable fact that children “universally” have the apparent ability to acquire a first language, sometimes more than one, during a critical period of development, mostly between the ages of two and four years. Little is known of how this process works, and Pinker adds nothing but idle speculation to the little Chomsky gives us. The main contribution of this school of thought is negative: it does give us some insight into why learning a second language would be difficult but none into the question of how it works, nor indeed how it is possible at all; yet it clearly is possible. Pinker's “entertaining” and verbose description of the third person singular conjugation only demonstrates that an inaccurate descriptive grammar can be even worse than a purely arbitrary prescriptive grammar.
Pinker's description of the conceptual difficulty of the third person singular conjugation grossly exaggerates that difficulty, and is thus more polemical than scientific. In stark contrast to Chomsky, who is content to say that the innateness of the language capacity is tautologous, Pinker seems to think that genetics are magical, and that this genetic magic is proved necessary by the arbitrariness and complexity of rules. I base my contrary view on the experience of having taught many adult students to master this essentially simple grammar.
The first step in the transformation is profoundly anti-instinctual. The strongest instinct of the adult student of a second language is to take their mother tongue as a template for all language and to seek a code that permits thinking in the first language and translating word for word. It is hard to break this instinct, but it must be overcome because it simply doesn't work. Language is not code.
The second step is to know the grammar of your first language explicitly rather than implicitly. In other words, the student of a second language must relearn what they already know and learn it by the rules. It does little good to describe the form of the third person singular to a student who does not understand that terminology. Yet it is easy, because the English language is nearly devoid of conjugation, the verb to be and the third person singular being the only exceptions. So to keep it simple we must offer a simple definition of what we mean by third person. The first and second person work together as a pair to engage in conversation. Every conversation, in any language, is between the first and second person, which change places as the conversation proceeds. The third is the other person, the one not in the conversation, whom you and I are talking about but to whom we do not speak.
The last step is simply the recognition that, with the exception of irregular plural nouns (men, women, children, people) there is ordinarily exactly one -s or -es suffix between the noun and verb as a pair. This is best demonstrated with one of the words that can be either noun or verb, for example the word cook. So we discover that in the singular “a cook cooks,” while in the plural the suffix moves from one word to the other so that “cooks cook.” Similarly, ducks duck and a duck ducks, although admittedly the word duck does not quack.

Responding to critics who say we ought to have found the genetic basis for Universal Grammar if it exists, Chomsky observes that “it is fiendishly difficult to find the genetic basis for anything.” Fair enough, but surely we must remain skeptical of the existence of any gene when the only evidence for it is our need to explain the phenomenon it claims to explain. The existence of genes that generally support human language in a variety of ways is not at issue for me, and I understand and fully accept that it is not the intention of “universal” (or better “generative”) grammar to facilitate second language learning but only to seek scientifically meaningful explications for first language acquisition, yet must wonder if it is too much to ask that advocates of the universality pretense desist from disseminating disinformation about grammar. If there are no rules then there can be no rule against rules, and we do well to embrace those accurate descriptive rules that enhance communication.

Theodore Cleaver may not be a furry rodent with oversized incisors employed by the Army Corps of Engineers, but dams are still built by beavers.
The Advocates of the generative grammar concept tend to make imaginary instincts necessary by offering inadequate solutions to contrived problems. In comparing an active voice “Beavers build dams” to a passive voice expression of the same idea, “Dams are built by beavers,” Pinker claims that “down in the verb phrase...the nouns are playing the same roles in both sentences,” but that “up at the sentence (IP) level...they are playing different roles. The active sentence is saying something about beavers in general, and happens to be true; the passive sentence is saying something about dams in general, and happens to be false (since some dams...are not built by beavers).”
But this is patent nonsense. If it were true that an analysis involving the I-bar schema could change the truth value of an expression plotted in it, this would seem a compelling argument against relying on such schema, but fortunately it is not true. Neither the active nor the passive form of this equivalent expression says anything about beavers in general or dams in general, rather both are quite specific, the first concerning beavers that build dams, the second concerning dams that are built by beavers. The Grand Coulee, built by the Corps of Engineers under FDR is mentioned in neither, and is therefore quite irrelevant, both on the surface and in any imaginary deep structure.

Can eagles that swim fly?
The last thing I want is to prove Chomsky wrong, and there is actually no need to do so. My objection to Pinker has little to do with Chomsky, despite appearance to the contrary. Pinker takes Chomsky's tautology and treats it as empirical fact, and insists on this “fact” as a dogma. Chomsky, to his credit, has always been careful to avoid this. Pinker lacks Chomsky's logical discipline and scientific rigor, and so undermines Chomsky's legacy by being associated with it.
Our alternate hypothesis is that phrases can be generated, creating their syntax word by word without resort to an innate universal grammar or intrusive genetic mutations re-wiring the brains of babies. That is not to say that it is somehow wrong to say that language is innate. The idea of some selective pressure for the production of language in our species does not properly belong to the Darwinian paradigm in any case, even if we can rationalize a place for it there. The question of selective advantage is a quite different matter. Selective advantage can be and often is the result of innovation rather than mutation. All humanity shares species being with Louis Pasteur, and are more likely to survive to reproductive age because of the development of the germ theory of disease. I have no idea whether Robert Fleming inherited any genetic disposition toward microbiology from his nobel prize winning father Sir Alexander Fleming, but that is quite irrelevant, as being of the same species as his father was sufficient for him to benefit from the survival advantages of his father's discovery of penicillin. With that in mind, our search for the elusive grammar gene seems quite quixotic. Moreover, it is precisely language, whether instinctive or somehow learned through a process we do not understand, that empowers us to teach our children myriad things that our genes and theirs neglect to mention. We moderns seem obsessed with worship of our genome, a kind of “genomolatry” that is as unscientific as it is blasphemous.
Okay, but what about syntax, if it is neither learned nor genetically dictated, what is it and where does it come from? Syntax: the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. If it is neither learned nor genetically determined I think it can only be an invention. We ought not over-think this phenomenon.
Let's begin with a single word, the termination of a problematic expression that is often used pedagogically by Chomsky, the word fly. What questions does the word suggest, and what answers to previous questions are implicit in it? The one word answer could be responding to a question like “What do they do?” Having an element of doing in our emergent sentence we might now wish to add an element of being. We can readily do this with another verb, provided we use the determiner “that” at its front, thus we ask “What are they that fly” and answer “Those that swim fly.” “What are those that swim and fly?” “They may be insects, flying fish, or birds.” “What birds swim, fly and duck?” “Ducks swim, fly and duck.” “What birds swim and duck but do not fly?” “Penguins.” “And what about eagles?”. “Eagles that swim fly.” “Is that possible? Can eagles that swim fly?” Indeed, eagles that swim fly.
Any who have studied Chomsky will recognize this pedagogical question. Whenever I have heard him ask this question in a lecture, I have noticed that he pauses slightly before the word “swim” as if “instinctively” aware that it is not the most obvious action for an eagle, even where the discussion is purely for demonstration. Notice also that nowhere in this dialogue has the affirmative expression “Eagles that swim can fly” appeared. Why not? It is logically identical to the simpler affirmative without the word can. Thus the word can is added at the beginning of the emergent phrase like all the other added words. There is no “motion,” and putting the auxiliary in its rule-based place at the beginning of a yes/no question needs not leaves a trace anywhere. Notice also that this is done with no reliance on a tedious I-bar schema, with no need for a grammar gene, and with no need to intrusively re-wire a baby's brain. That the baby's brain is language ready is indeed tautologous, just as Chomsky has always said. It is ready to acquire language not because it has a language instinct but simply because it is a human child. When she grows up she may overcome her instincts enough to learn Spanish as well.
In sum, if any still imagine that this book is entertaining and informative I would encourage you to critically compare it to this brief review. I am entertaining and informative, Steven Pinker is really just silly. PAMitchell

The first edition of The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker was published in 1994. Similar to Pinker’s other research and publications, this book focuses primarily on linguistics and the other components that are associated with linguistics, such as grammar, words, syntax, phonics, tone, speech, and sound. He is highly interested in language because of its power to make the mind think, create, and imagine. Pinker was born in Canada and did most of his schooling Canada, that is until he came to the United States to study at Harvard University for his Doctorate degree. He is most commonly known for being an American psychologist, author, and professor with many prestigious awards for his research, publications, and work; and he is currently a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is a credited author and psychologist because he is still an active member in the sciences for still conducting research on language, cognition, and human nature. Many of his publications are written for a general audience and are intended for anyone who uses any form of language.
Throughout the book, Pinker shared his own research, explained the experiments he conducted to formulate his theory, and presented multiple theories from other credible psychologists, linguists, and philosophers that he either combated or used to support his theory that language is innate. Pinker concludes that language is an instinct from birth and it is not a skill that is learned because language is a product of human instinct and not a cultural invention. After Pinker examined how different civilizations communicated with each other, he also concluded that there use to exist only one language. However, through time, different categories of languages began to progress, which is the cause for the multiple languages that exist today. A large majority of Pinker’s focus is on children because as infants they learn to speak without being given a proper education about the grammatical rules for the language that they speak. Infants, whether they are deaf or not, are born with linguistic abilities that they become aware of in order to communicate with the language of their mothers. For example, non-deaf infants communicate through babbling while infants who are deaf use different signs and signals to communicate with the language of their mothers. For a better understanding of this concept, Pinker compares infants to a newly born spider spinning webs, stating that spiders are not taught to spin webs, but that they are genetically inclined to develop the ability to spin webs. In order to study how language effects the mind, Pinker conducted his own research to focus on the brain and how the different components of language effect the brain. He used MRIs and other medical imaging of the brain for his research and experiments in order to view the brain and brain activity during silent times, speaking in different tones, and the reading of different syntaxes, words, and speech. These are all the topics that Pinker covers in the first edition of The Language Instinct.
I find the topic of language very interesting, especially because it is one of the only components that separates us from other animals and I also find it fascinating to see how children grow and develop in relation to language, which Pinker uses as a focal point. I was expecting this book to be very dull, too wordy, and not easy to understand. However, since the book was designed by Pinker for a general audience, the book was very interesting to read and easy to follow along from beginning to end. The book was rather long, but because it was unexpectedly thought-provoking to read, so it did not seem like too much reading. There was also a lot of information presented in the book, but it was structured in a way that made sense and was relevant to Pinker’s idea of language being innate. The information presented was used to support Pinker’s theory and to better grasp his theory. Due to my understanding of neuroscience, I think that I had an advantage of understanding the book much clearer and in more depth on certain topics. For example, when Pinker discussed the parts of the brain and how they can be affected, I was able to recall the material that I learned from neuroscience and apply it to what Pinker was discussing. Again, because the book was written for a general audience, the information that was presented was explained very well and was executed in its presentation of information, theories, data, and research.
I believe the information and science presented by Pinker is accurate and valid because he went on to write a series of books following the publication of The Language Instinct, which he uses as a foundation for his series of books, which are more current. As mentioned before, the first edition of the book was published in 1994, which was the edition of the book that I read. Soon after purchasing the book, I realized that the most recent edition is the third edition of the book, which was published in 2008 since Pinker still conducts research in regards towards language. New editions of the book were published because Pinker, through his research, collected new information, which he used to further support his original ideas and concepts and he also used the new information to present new ideas about language. Another reason the book was enjoyable and easy to follow was because Pinker focused everything on his theory. He stayed consistent in presenting information and relating it back to support his theory, which made all the information presented as valuable and purposeful. Overall, I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language because it is an interesting book, intriguing, and stimulating to read. The book was also cohesive to follow along without being overwhelmed with too much scientific terminology and information. My only suggestion is that you read the most recent rendition of the book for more accurate information than the first edition.

In this book, Steven Pinker sets out to introduce the reader to the scientific study of language. At the start of the book, he addresses it to anyone who uses language, including linguistics students and scholars. My guess though is that most of the readers of this book will be educated non-linguists looking for a popular science book to entertain them and teach them a few interesting facts.

My main criticism of the text is that it doesn't live up to its name. Rather than being an introduction to the study of language in general, as its name implies, it is an introduction to a specific school of thought in linguistics - Chomskyan linguistics, or generative grammar.

I would question the appropriateness of this way of writing an introductory book to the subject for the general public in the first place, even if it happens to be the mainstream paradigm, as in this case. But what makes things worse is that Pinker never makes it sufficiently clear to the lay reader that his is only one side of the story, and that many of the `facts' presented are disputed and controversial.

Mind you, as an introduction to generative grammar, the book works great, and even as a linguist I came away feeling a bit clearer about this way of reasoning, which can be quite opaque.

I think that if you write a popular science book, you should try to be as objective as possible. If you adopt a particular way of looking at things you should clearly state so, and preferably contrast it with other theories. Two writers that are good at this are David Crystal (Encyclopedia of Language) and Nicholas Ostler (Empires of the Word).

Not only is Pinker's style dishonest to the reader, but it also makes the book lose in entertainment value. One of the major tenets of generative grammar is `the modularity of language', which states that language makes up a special, distinct module of the mind that is fundamentally different from other cognitive abilities, and only interacts with them in a restricted way. This narrows the scope of this theory and leaves out a lot of interesting things that could have been said about the relation of language to culture, art, history etc.

I was going to give this book two stars for its dishonest style, but then I realised that it had actually stimulated me to think about the subject, if only to form counterarguments to everything I disagreed with, so I'll give it three. Read it, but read it critically, even if you're a non-linguist.

After reading a few chapters, I waved the white flag. I felt I was sitting in a college classroom, taking notes and trying to impress the professor by looking interested. Actually, I am interested in this subject, but I found this book to be wordy and too pedantic.
I became interested in linguistics after I saw several DVD's from "The Great Courses", presented by Dr. John McWhorter from Stanford University. I enjoyed these presentations and wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong book - my fault, I guess. I'm sure the author had much to say, but the book was too tedious - I lost interest.

Before I first read this book twenty years ago, I had little interest in language or linguistics. I bought "The Language
Instinct" on a lark, and I've been thankful ever since that I indulged that whim. Pinker takes the reader on a fascinating tour
of the world of language - a journey that is enlightening, erudite, accessable to an educated layperson, and often humourous.

More than a half century ago the prevailing theory of human language development was informed by behaviorist psychology, and
this theory of language maintained that language acquisition was a matter of learning by stimulus-response dynamics. Language
was viewed as merely a human cultural artifact that need not have developed at all - a fortuitous historical accident. Child
psychologists led parents to believe that extensive verbal engagement with their children was crucial for optimizing language
acquisition, and this view informed educational practices as well. However, in the late 1950s a challenge to the behaviorist
position appeared, and it would touch-off one the most famed debates in the history of academia when the linguist/philosopher
Noam Chomsky introduced a competing theory of language development that rested on the notion that humans are "hard wired" for
language and that all the world's languages are derived from what he called a "Universal Grammar."

Pinker, heavily influenced by Chomsky, takes this notion of a natural human language capability a step further and argues,
forcefully, that there exists a dedicated language module in a normal human brain that facilitates the acquisition and
construction of language. In addition, Pinker also argues that the development of the language capability by our hominid
ancestors must have arisen through Darwinian natural selection - a contention toward which Chomsky is somewhat skeptical.
However, Pinker makes his case in quite a compelling manner and it is no longer controversial, though still not universally
accepted in the linguistics profession. The natural human language competency, the language module in the brain, and the
development of this capability as a Darwinian adaptation together form the thesis of "The Language Instinct."

Pinker also presents some fascinating stories of less conventional developments of language such as:

The formation of pidgin tongues - the ungrammatical aping of a language unknown to the speakers of the pidgin and the evolution
of pidgin into a creole ( a pidgin with grammar), often as soon as the second generation.

The surprisingly sophisticated grammar and syntax found in sign languages.

The grammatical consistency of non-standard dialects such as Black English Vernacular - that actually obeys its own grammatical
rules as regularly as standard English does.

Pinker also explodes that fanciful myth of the human language capabilities exhibited by chimpanzees that was so credulously
accepted a few decades ago, and puts to bed that notion of language-as-thought known in academic circles as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis.

I re-read "The Language Instinct" just before writing this review, and found it even more absorbing, not to mention entertaining
than the first time through. If you have any interest in language/linguistics I highly recommend it.

When you study linguistics friends and family are often puzzled as to WHAT exactly you study. I have given this book to several people because Pinker does a great job of explaining Chomskyan linguistics in a non-technical way. The name "Language Instinct" refers to the assumption that humans do have some pre-wiring unique to our species to facilitate language acquisition in children. This remains a controversial assumption for many people, including some linguists, but this book presents the phenomena that have led many linguists to assume there is some truth to the claim.

It's also a good introduction to some of the cool features of "language: that you may not have noticed before. You'll also have a front row seat to the eternal debate between linguists and other language professionals on the topic of "proper grammar" with an amusing revelation that even Pinker has pet grammatical peeves, even though it's actually a little irrational from a linguistic point of view.

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).

I rate this book the maximum because it contains a seminal point. One that, once assimilated, enriches a person's understanding of reality. Language (singular) in general, not specific languages (plural), is an innate, genetically induced behavior in our species. Pinker's predecessor Noam Chomsky hit upon this notion and Pinker has taken up the torch in this book describing specifically what Chomsky originally formulated. Languages (plural), such as Mandarin Chinese and Castillian Spanish are not innate but arbitray. On the other hand the language ability (singular) is not arbitrary but a highly innate neural mode of cognizing and communicating which is generated by Wernicke's, Broca's, and other neuronal groups in the brain. In short, language is an innate genetic function of our hominid bodies, much as flying is to sea gulls. It's an instinct. Pinker proves this over and over in this book by citing experimental data, negative control pathology examples, and other analogies in the real world (such as the language behavior of the deaf). Knowing that language is a genetically induced, innate instinct helps one to cut through a lot of other fluff about consciousness, language, the animal kingdom, etc., which allows for more rapid passage from the premises of animal behavior to conclusions about their causes and effects.
This book is also not a bad science read in general, If you can get past the stuffiness of the grammarian (a few pots of coffee won't hurt) some excellent, very relevent points are made along the way. Beside the primary and most valuable thesis of this book, that language (singular....not languages, plural) is a genetic event in the same vein as eye color, Pinker makes the sagacious observations that BEV (black english vernacular) is as bonified a language as continental French or Castillian Spanish; a useful tool to have when debating racists. We also soon find, thanks to Pinker's excellent linguistic knowledge base, that there is no 'proper usage' in the cultural employment of language. Like many cultural phenomena, morals, fashion, etc., language is defined by statistical (popular) usage. It's funny and fitting to see Pinker's dishing of language mavens who lament the degradation of the current King's language. Why if this were the case, we'd still be speaking colonial era English. While language (singular) may be a genetically coded biological phenomenon in our species, individual languages (plural) are diverse, dynamic, evolving, and everything but static.
The laying out of the rules of grammer in this book can get quite tedious, but the book's most redeeming feature is that it drives home the very pertinent biological axiom about human behavior in terms of our linguistic activity, with some nice sidebars on insider linguistics jargon. It's this type of science writing that enriches the lay reader and makes being a bibliophile a healthy addiction.

Steven Pinker serves as tour guide through syntax and language development to support his most compelling claims that all infants come into the world with linguistic ability and that grammatical rules are senseless, as they are concocted arbitrarily and perpetuated pointlessly.

"The Language Instinct" launches from the deep structure linguistic theory of Pinker's MIT colleague, Noam Chomsky, to suggest that language is indeed hard wired in the brain but that it is also learned, evolving over millennia and differentiating through forces of mutation, heredity, and geographical isolation.

The book reviews the function of phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, and alphabets with a good portion examining syntax and semantics in combination. The insights a casual reader will gain from this book will result only from a careful, sometimes painstaking, study of Pinker's dense prose, which he often peppers with humor.

This book was instructive, well written, fascinating, and mostly comprehensible. I say "mostly" comprehensible because the detail required to discuss something as complex as language means that the reader is asked to remember and understand all those school terms from writing class that most of us quickly forget - case, nominative, accusative, prepositions, phonemes, indirect objects, participles, auxiliaries, articles, determiners, intransitives, and the like. Fortunately, Pinker is lucid and practical, providing a glossary (which is needed for repeated referral while slogging through some parts of the book) and plenty of down to earth examples to demonstrate his points. He makes a strong case for humans having a language instinct, and does so in a very engaging fashion. I found the book entertaining and full of fun, a genial approach for the thoughtful ruminations about the fascinating reality of language. I wasn't convinced by his arguments in chapter 11 on 'The Big Bang', but the rest of the book won me over. This book requires concentration to read and determination to finish, but is well worth the effort to do both.

Absolutely key book for those interested in how language evolved. Some of its central points are the subject of impassioned debate: Pinker is a Chomskyite, and argues that humans are born with an instinctual ability to learn the language spoken around them. Many others are less deterministic. Pinker's evidence -- the extraordinary speed with which children of two to four learn language -- is powerful, but underlying assumption of an innate "grammatical gene" is not accepted by many in the field. Despite the debate, those with an interest in how language developed and what it is should read this book. Not only is it thought provoking, it is very, very well written

You ought to ignore the less-stellar reviews here; they're obviously written by experts dissatisfied with Dr. Pinker's conclusions, people who probably have grants at stake, and are not written by the audience this book speaks best to.
And it speaks *beautifully*. If you're not professionally involved in the more technical aspects of the debates explored here, if you couldn't care less about ending sentences with prepositions but don't know why others would, and you have a pulse, you're bound to enjoy this brilliant introduction to linguistics, which also illustrates fascinating points about literature, neurology, genetics, evolution, class systems, history, children, baseball and crossword puzzles. (whew.) Rife with pop culture references (who could quote Dorothy Parker, Dan Quayle, Bob Dylan and Shakespeare successfully but this man, who admits to loving the word "diss" and disliking "whom"?), this book will keep you from reading your next few copies of both Reader's Digest and the New Yorker; you could even toss the Bach tapes you play for your 4-year-olds and just read them this at bedtime. And, you know, that's a good thing.
"I have never met a person who is not interested in language," Dr. Pinker begins. No other instinct more steadily binds us and defines us as human, and no other book has poured so much cool information into such spellbinding writing as this one. Dr. Pinker, take another bow. There are roses waiting in the green room.

I must have read The Language Instinct some 10 years ago.
First thing. The author des not hide the science behind bogus mathematic formalisms, which are hardly understood by linguists themselves, I studied Post-Graduate Logics, so I can only smile at attempts to try to lend an incensed façade to not fully thought or ambiguous theories. But exactly because Pinker writes so well (as opposed to Chomski, his hero and whose theory he sets to divulge and clarify), he attains precisely the oposite effect. I refer here by the way to the Pinker-Samson debate, but my own conclusion is that the so described "language instinct" is something so deprived of content that it just repeats the half a dozen requirements for any semantic system, you could check by reading this little Aristotle's book on language, called "The Categories", all which is attributed to this instinct are a scarce set of 6 rules (basically: we use language to refer to subjects who do something or are in a certain state, as well as to the object of such actions, we may refer to them using proper nouns which correspnd to letters like a b c in Logics, or variables like x y z, and finally we can determine the existence or non-existence of an individual or set of individuals by quantificator operators) which any semiotical complex simply cannot do without, and if you care reading a book on Formal Logic, those are the rules to produce well-formed sentences plus a redundancy mechanism by which you can deliver new utterances despite the fact that you have never heard or memorized them. My conclusion on this point is that Chomski's instinct is but a set of skills, obviously passed on by evolution and which was particularly accompanied by the the adaptation of the breathing and digestive apparatus to produce sounds, but which underlies our capacity of dealing with any semiotical system, not only natural language and Fodor's language of thought.
Second, by bringing up the testimonials of people who never learned a natural language but had thoughts and could therefore tell their stories once they later in life were taught to speak a natural language, Chomski proves the existence of Fodor's language of thought, and that is one of the biggest achievement of philosophy in the century, and rules out accomodating and irrational theories that claim that our languages sets unsurmountable boundaries to "faculty of judgement" or that we are impeded by languages to access the truth, which, therefore, so they conclude ina specious turn, does not exist objectively.
Third and not least, in Philosophy nowadays whenever you type "Quine" on a search machine, this books shows up. Quine was a relativist who wrote an influencial paper during the hippie era in which he asserted that languages are not intertranslatable as a rule, not only natural languages, but even ideolects, in my case, the variety of Portuguese I speak as my individual performance of some shared rules. The crux of the argument, is that all units of knowledge is intertwined in a vast canvas, so that all depends on the broad context, and individual words or certain reference-oriented sentences cannot escape that circle. Of course that is absurd. We communicate pretty well with eachother despite the variety of languages or ideolects we use, we translate documents and books and we cannot fool ourselves and by that those renderings whereas all but wrong. Had Quine lived in a more multicultural setting, had he bee fluent in more idioms, he would never suspect the validity of translations. Enough. The most precious and praised part in "The Language of Thought" is this chapter in which Pinker shows the preposterousness and the ridicule of Quine's indeterminacy thesis. It is a cornerstone of Realism and together with earlier Putnam's and Kripke's works, it has settled a moderate realism as the mainstream position in Philosophy nowadays, after centuries of a lunatic blend of nominalism and positivism (this used as a resource to which nominalists recur when they perceive nominalism's implications turn out to be more than a time embarassfully far-fetched).
As a conclusion, I cannot but recommend the reading of this accessible, stylish and simultaneously landmark book.

A good friend with whom I was discussing language urged me to read this book. I must say that I was captivated from the first sentence. Other reviewers have mentioned that this is not a book for everyone and I agree - much of the science and terminology of the linguists is beyond me - and I consider myself fairly well educated. When Pinker steers clear from mucking up the story with in-depth explanations of word placements and whatnot - it is a brilliant treatise on this marvelous "instinct" - the ability of human beings to learn and use language.
Pinker sets out to view language as a characteristic (like the elephant's trunk) that simply happens to be unique to this species (which is why the "sign language using" apes in our society are little more than farces). I think I loved most of all the convincing examples he uses to support his argument. Whether it was about the deaf children of hearing parents who learn a fluent sign language, or the aphasics, or disproving the Eskimo `hoax' (they don't have 100s of words for snow), or the simple support of a language "gene" - and a description of what he calls, "mentalese" - I was hooked. Although I suspect that this book was meant to be used as a college textbook - the fact remains that if you are interested in language and the human abilities to learn it, manipulate it, process it, and communicate with it - then this is a wonderful book.

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 the store
(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.

"The Language Instinct" is probably the most enjoyable book that I have ever read about language. From start to finish, the author entertained while skilfully carving out a compelling case for why he believes that man has a unique gift for language learning. Whether you are a linguist, a sociologist, a neurologist, a language lover, or a fan of popular culture, there is something in this book for you. Pinker is erudite and eclectic, covering everything from Chomsky, grammar genes, children's language, Creoles, aphasics and the origin and evolution of language, to George Bush, Gary Larsen, Woody Allen, the Hill Street Blues, the Sapir-Whorf Great Eskimo Hoax, and Orwellian Newspeak. I liked this book not just because of the excellent way that Pinker presented his scientific argument, but also because of its richness about language and life in general. If there were one person that I could choose to invite to a cocktail party, it would be Steven Pinker. Do I believe everything he writes? Of course not!

The main idea of the book The Language Instinct is to try and explain how language came to be, even though there are many theories, and how our brain is able to comprehend words in general and automatically know what they mean. The author of this book, Steven Pinker, was born on September 18, 1954 in Canada to Jewish parents. He graduated from Dawson College, got a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and also got Doctor of Philosophy degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University. His specializations are in psycholinguistics and visual cognition. He has written 6 books and had nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. He became a Harvard professor, more specifically, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology.

In this book, it talks about how it is hard to think of language in general when it is like an instinct for us to do. How language came to be, what words mean, how to form coherent sentences, knowing when to say the right thing and how, are all simply mind-boggling. The author explains one way in which language came to be, by explaining how each generation of children tries to mimic their mothers in talking, but end up creating their own version of the word so that they can better say it. And with time, that made up word could possibly be used in the everyday language. He also talks about this word called pidgin. Pidgin is created when groups of different languages come together and try to communicate to each other. For example, if an English speaking person is trying to talk to a Spanish speaking person, the English person will use a sort of choppy version of Spanish to try and get their idea across to the Spanish speaking person. This choppy talk is what is known as pidgin. The word creole is also discussed which is formed from the pidgin talk, just a more comprehensible version. The word dialect can also be misconceived; treating a dialect as a lesser version of a language is wrong. Who is to say what "proper" language is and is not. If some people speak "improperly" but still understand each other, who is to say that this improper-ness is not also a language? Pinker's statement, "Children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire" could not be truer.

Pinker also questions whether thought is dependent on words. Sometimes when we say things, it does not come out the way we want them to, like how the thought is in our brain. Even when we write things down but then stop and think "no that is not what I wanted to say". Our brain remembers the gist of something, the gist of what we wanted to say but not the exact words. So here basically, thought is not, however, dependent on words. Sometimes words fail to describe the thoughts going on in our minds.

Pinker says, "But there are other languageless beings who have been studied experimentally" 3 examples he gives being babies, monkeys, and human adults who say that their best thinking is done without words. An experiment done by Karen Wynn was on how babies are able to do math in its simplest form. If you show a baby something for long enough, the baby will grow bored and look away. But if you add more than one of that particular object, the baby will stare longer. When she kept adding and taking away an object, the baby was transfixed and seemed to try and figure out how it all was possible. In another experiment done by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, they were able to see that monkeys could tell who was related to who between other monkeys. As for the third example, a lot of creative people have said that their best creative experiences have been through images in their brain rather than through words. This can be understandable. There have been many great books written based on an image or a dream the author may have had. Thinking in images and shapes rather than in words seems to be a favorite throughout the book. Sometimes it is hard to put thoughts into words, because sometimes words just cannot justify the thought.

In connecting this book with what has been learned in class, one can say that language in itself has its own evolution. If humankind has continuously made up its own language in each generation, then the language we have today is most likely definitely not anywhere close to how it was thousands of years ago. Language can also be argued in being apart of natural selection. In order to get what you need, such as food at a grocery store, one must be familiar with the language of the area in order to ask someone in which direction are the apples located. Sure, you can search for things yourself, but eventually you will come across something you cannot do alone, and without proper communication, there will be no one to help you. This book does a good job in talking about different forms of language, whether it be grammatically correct sentences, non grammatically correct sentences but still gets its point across, and images and thoughts rather than words. It was thoroughly a good book and put a lot of things into perspective regarding language.

Summary of Review
"The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" by Steven Pinker is an intriguing and insightful look into the world of language acquisition. Language is often perceived as something that is taught, both stylistically and grammatically, however, Pinker begs the case that humans are actually born with an innate capacity for language. Pinker outlines his argument as the fact that "Language is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently...it is an instinct."

Overall Opinion of the Book
Overall, this book is well written and soundly organized, with a variety of angles from which Pinker poses his argument that language is an instinct. This book is written from Pinker's point of view but is juxtaposed with excerpts from various biologists, psychologists, neurologists, and numerous other scientists. Though these excerpts prove helpful in proving each of Pinker's point, I feel that the author took too much liberty with the verbosity of his book. There are some points which he presents with example after example that say the same exact thing. However, despite the wordiness, Pinker was successful in producing strong arguments for why language should be considered an instinct.

Style and Structure of the Book
Stylistically speaking, this book is structured as a persuasive argument with anecdotal segments based of other experts in the field, to more easily persuade the reader into the view point of the author. However, at times, the book could a bit too verbose, causing one to speed read through the examples due to their length and over commentary by Pinker. The book starts off by introducing the concept of language being seen as an instinct. It then delves into various chapters such as "Chatterboxes" which goes into how children use language, "Mentalese" which explores how the mind has a language of its own that it uses for thinking, "The Big Bang" which explains natural selection and evolution in relation to the language instinct, as well as "Language Mavens" which goes into a tell-all about language and its rules, both grammatical and ungrammatical in order to prove the point that language is indeed an instinct.

Synopsis of Parts of the Book
"Chatterboxes"
After introducing the concept of language as an instinct, Pinker goes on discuss language acquisition as seen in children. Here he makes the point that children are not taught everything that they say, rather they observe the world around them and create their own language which then transforms over the years to become the "boring" language that we speak as adults. Whether or not children are taught language, they manage to pick it up anyway. How is this possible? Pinker argues that language is a trait that is unique to humans. It is a trait that developed evolutionarily for the sole purpose of providing a means of communication. Children whose brains are hardwired to take in the world around them want to share everything they observe, so whether or not they are actively taught how to communicate, they inevitably figure out a way to do so.

"Mentalese"
In this chapter, Pinker goes on to argue the point that one cannot use language to think because it is too ambiguous. He reasons that with the ability to represent the world through symbols that can then be interpreted in a logical sense, is how language is perceived. Here, Pinker hints at mental representation as a language of its own - Mentalese. According to Pinker, "knowing a language is knowing how to translate Mentalese into a string of words and vice versa." Even in the case that some doesn't have a spoken language, such as individuals who are deaf and dumb or even babies, Mentalese is in existence in their minds since they are still able to find ways to communicate their thoughts and ideas to others. Pinker says, "if babies did not have Mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean, indicating that Mentalese might actually be simpler than the spoken language since it does not have to deal with all the grammatical issues of spoken language. With spoken and written language being based off of "Mentalese" it only makes sense that language is more of an instinct that anything else.

"The Big Bang"
This chapter reveals the two main arguments for language acquisition: instinct vs. evolution. The Darwinian theory of evolution can be simplified to layman's terms as survival of the fittest and natural selection. However, the counter argument is that language is a uniquely human instinct. Here Pinker goes on to talk about certain have their own unique trait such as elephants with their multi-faceted trunks. This is not an evolutionary mutation in the human gene to enable communication. Humans inherently found the need to communicate and thus Mentalese became formulated into the written and spoken word.

"Language Mavens"
Most of the chapters in this book provide an angle from which Pinker attacks the viewpoints of those who claim language is not an instinct. This chapter is perhaps the most unnecessary chapter in the book and proves my point that Pinker can, at times, be a little too verbose unnecessarily. In this chapter, Pinker goes on to talk about the death of the spoken and written language as we develop as a population wherein "educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, an valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functional illiterates." This chapter goes on to discuss how as time goes on it is apparent that people are becoming less and less knowledgeable of their own language. When the rest of the book contains valid arguments for why language should be perceived as an instinct, this chapter just seems a little out of place.

Recommendation
Overall, I believe that this book was an intriguing yet insightful read regardless of the fact that it was a bit lengthy. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in language acquisition or the argument that language should be perceived as an instinct. Along with Pinker's input and commentary there are a wide variety of sources that emerge as excerpts that provide an avenue for individuals who wish to dive deeper into the topic. Though I do believe there were some extraneous chapters and commentary in this book, the insight attained is definitely worth the read.

This book is a good presentation of basic linguistics, theoretical and empirical, for the general reader. There are some analytical constructs that will be new to many readers but anyone comfortable with toy logic games will have no trouble with them.
The book is always interesting. It is best and most reliable when Pinker sticks to well-established claims. It is engaging and worth reading even when he doesn't -- the issues are interesting, but his presentation is unduly slanted in favor of his view.
Thus the weakest aspect of the book is the one surrounding the title, human language as an instinct. Here the book bags empirics or rigorous theory and turns to exhortation. That's fine if the reader is aware of the type of argument Pinker is making, though it is sometimes a little hard to tell because he shifts somewhat freely. The trouble arises if someone credits the evidence marshaled for basic tenets of linguistics to Pinker's rank speculation.
Overall, definitely worth reading. It will catch you up on the generative grammar you always wanted to learn and go beyond it, at least for the purposes of your next cocktail party.

This book has received very good reviews in the press; don't believe the hype.

Pinker's writing style is initially engaging, even fun -- it is perhaps best described as clever -- but after 100 pages or so it becomes annoying. The book is about 500 pages. Furthermore, the page count does not reflect the information content of the book. There is much repetition. Plus some questionable science. And perhaps some uncalled for criticism.

The main problem is that Pinker is trying to advance a theory of language (which is probably at least partially true) without having sufficient evidence in hand, and without even suggesting what it would take to prove or disprove it. This leads to argument-by-repetition and poor science. Intriguing ideas, such as the Whorf hypothesis or animal capacity for language, are glibly dismissed by personally attacking their proponents rather than by counterargument.

I found one chapter, "The Language Mavens", particularly bizarre. In it, Pinker shows his ego by skewering (albeit politely) various writers on language (e.g., Safire and Lederer) for not sharing his linguistic views.

"The Language Instinct" is probably best read as Pinker's version of "Linguistics 101". It is informative and features many linguistics factoids and anecdotes, provided you can get past Pinker's conceit.

Lesson Learned

Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct provides a fascinating look at language. Whenever analyzing an instinct or routine and making oneself aware of how the brain makes it all happen, one slowly becomes more aware of their brain; which is an amazing feeling to say the least. Although there are points in Pinker's analysis that make the book feel like one big English lesson than an analysis of the brain, his goal is not to lecture about proper language usage. In fact quite often the book will use examples of improper child speak or slang as a way of showing how language is truly more of an instinct than any sort of developed art. Writing is the unnatural/secondary/developed art of language. We learn writing, often as children, through repetition and long laborious lessons. Because of this it is clearly not an instinct, but rather something of a convenience for communications sake. Being introduced to this kind of thinking really makes one think about their everyday life, especially now in the 21st century. Today almost all our communication is visual, but our instinct is auditory. One might ask then, how did we get here?

Pinker does attempt to help answer that question by looking over the theories and works of evolutionists, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists such as: Charles Darwin, William James, Noam Chomsky, Roger Shepard, Frank Keil, Donald Symons, and many more. Darwin was the first to articulate that language could in no way have been a deliberate invention of humans. His partner, William James, then also noted that our instincts do not act alone. Both of these ideas are difficult to wrap one's head around when we do think about what we do and how we do it every day.
Thinking of our ability to speak and not learned is the first concept that Pinker tries to tackle, by looking at the work of various other scientists, because it is the most difficult for people to grasp. It is also the most important, though. However, when one looks at other species and how they communicate, which is what Darwin did, it becomes a bit easier to fathom. For instance birds communicate through singing, we see this and know this and we do not ask how or why, it is simply their instinct. Same goes for crickets and their chirping, dogs and their barking, and so on. Many other animal species have auditory means for communication that we understand as something they do on instinct. This is then why Pinker greatly stresses the importance and the genius of child speak and baby babble. It shows how from infancy we are using and making sound to convey meaning. As we grow and begin to learn language, we initially ignore all structural rules, because structure was developed more with writing than with initial spoken language. Therefore child speak, is language at its most basic and instinctual. Slang can viewed in the same way; because often the slang and utterly butchered language is used it is done so out of a lack of knowledge of learned structure. Thus again we see humans using their basic instinct to speak to communicate and do so in reasonably effective manner without any proper structure.
James' notion that our instincts do not act alone helps to then answer how language is an instinct and what part of the brain is responsible. Everything that the brain does, and everything we do instinctually is not a solo act; meaning not one part of brain is responsible and each instinct is reliant or tied to other instincts. Much like other natural tools that other organisms have (i.e. camouflage or ink release) is reliant on other instincts have as to know how and when to utilize the other. Language is no different; it is an instinct that is reliant on action and reaction of other instincts. In fact our intelligence as a whole makes humans reliant on more, sometimes quite intricate, instincts rather than less. Pinker expands upon this idea by talking about going into the mechanisms of learning. The human brain is extraordinarily complex and as a result makes human behavior difficult to explain. Language is no exception to this rule. Language requires intricate mental wiring and software, which evolution has given us, but also requires learning. However, learning has also started to be looked at as an innate mechanism that we have or that we have an innate mechanism that allows for learning. In either case all our instincts could not work and work together, if not for this mechanism.
This line of thinking helps us to then understand Chomsky's arguments, although not fully. The basis to all of Chomsky's work is that there is "underlying grammar" (Pinker) to all languages. Manny have found his work puzzling and controversial, but Pinker manages to weave it in to his own findings as far the brain structure, genetics, and language structure are concerned. Pinker uses some Chomsky's theories to help argue that in spite of all the various tongues we speak it is because of language that we all have a similar mind.

As mentioned before Pinker uses the works and theories of several different scientists and experts. The three just mentioned, however, truly spell out what The Language Instinct is all about. It is about evolution, mechanisms, instincts, our ability to learn. It looks and analyzes each piece, and all in between, puzzles them together. In doing so one can get an idea as to how we got to the level of language we are at today, as far as structure is concerned. As for why so much of our communication is visual as opposed to auditory today, that comes back to the fact that we developed written language for the sake of convenience. Therefore, today's excessive use of written language and visual communication as opposed to auditory is not a sign that we are losing our instinct to use or form language. We just like short cuts, despite the fact that it took a long road to get here.

This book contains a massive amount of information per chapter, unless this is your area study, every page will reveal new territory. While the author is busy proving that infants are born with an innate instinct to verbally communicate, facts and interesting tidbits are being offered to the reader. The opposing thought to this book is the idea of the mind as a blank slate, that children come into the world and must absorb everything. The author cites numerous studies whereby infants are thought to have an innate idea of objects and number, objects and motion, and are driven to absorb the language of their culture. The result is language is universal to all human cultures, and the language structures are very closely related. This book has spurred me onto pursue Steven Pinker's other writings. One drawback of the book was the sentence diagramming section which was a little too long and overdone. The author provides plenty of ammunition about the language mavens. These self-righteous protectors of the English language that decry its downfall when the language is being used in the common manner. The average speaker on the street because of this innate language instinct can always make himself understood and possesses a sophisticated logic that harks back to when the person was an infant. Very well written, very informative.

Whether you agree with Pinker's theories (some being extensions of concepts he presents in the earlier 'How the Mind Works') or not, the value of popular science writing is that it simplifies the complicated, and ignites the reader's interest in the subject matter. I feel this book does both. It has elicited the usual responses to his work: generous acclaim from the public and bitter invective from academics and pseudo-intellectuals. I would suggest you distinguish the qualities of the book from that of its pro-Chomsky arguments. Pinker's writing is engaging, well reasoned and funny. There is a lot of it though, and the varying quality of the chapters adds weight to the argument his books could be cut down in size, allowing them to be read before the printed material itself perishes naturally.

Professor Pinker has written an entertaining and easy-to-read book about how the human race comes to have language, apparently based on Noam Chomsky's not-so-entertaining or easy-to-read books, plus some of Prof. Pinker's own observations. He believes language comes out of people by instinct rather than totally as a learned skill. In this regard, he finds infants to be "geniuses" of language in that, for example, they can produce grammatically correct expressions they haven't heard before. To call them geniuses seems to me misusing the term somewhat. If a genius is someone who far exceeds the norm for his age group in some respect, then babies are not geniuses, since almost all seem to have the instinct for language. This minor quibble over terminology is not to dispute that human infants pick up language with great facility, however.
The discussion of how the brain works in the area of language is followed by a discussion of prescriptivist grammar, which Pinker criticizes for being a collection of outmoded and inappropriate rules that in many ways hamper more than help verbal expression. This is like shooting fish in a barrel, of course, since any collection of rules and regulations will eventually be rife with inconsistencies and unnecessary strictures. Taking potshots at grammar rules is like picking on the U.S. tax code or our collection of laws in general. As do many critics of grammar rules, Pinker occasionally employs ridiculous examples that a competent writer or editor would very likely avoid or eliminate entirely with a more efficient phrase or sentence.
When I encounter antiprescriptivists, I always wonder what they would substitute for grammar rules, if anything. They often refer to a "natural" grammar, which is apparently the instinctive process that Pinker finds. I wonder how far into the world of complex ideas this instinctive grammar can carry us and whether my version of it would jibe well enough with that of other folks to permit effective communication. Perhaps the antiprescriptivists will settle for updating existing texts with what they consider more suitable guidelines and pruning them of outmoded or senseless rules.
If you are interested in the origins of grammar and language, Pinker's book is a good place to start learning about them. It may relieve you of some of the grammar guilt you've carried since grade-school days.

This is indeed quite an amazing book. The writing style is simple, and Stevenmanages to handle this considerably complex subject with a great deal of dexterity.
Each chapter is complete in itself, and I would recommend that each chapter be read on a separate day. This allows you to think about what has been written, before proceeding further.
It is not a book for the casual reader, nor for the dilettante.
It is a book that you must return to after a while.

Pinker has a compelling argument to make, and he makes it well. Mixing wit and anecdote with controlled experiments, Pinker writes with a clear and enjoyable voice, while never losing sight of the science.
He starts with Chomsky, but this is not a rehash of old news. In fact, Pinker takes the ball and runs with it, giving Chomsky moral Darwinian support just where he needs it.
Aside from a perplexing respect for Barbra Streisand, his conclusions are logical and precise.
This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to know more about the world in which we live, and and a good read as well.

Quick comment: disparagingly calls "academic thought-criticisms," as if they were of a different, inferor, somehow less relevant breed than non-academic muscle-criticisms, or something.

Pinker does a fine job of being entertaining and of making linguistics sound interesting; I would not dispute that. But his gross exagerrations and ridiculous claims are simply unnecessary, akin to the political ideologue who has a point and then pushes it to the hilt. It's all or nothing with the ideologue, and the same goes for Pinker.

This book would have been no less entertaining if Pinker had screened out the claims he knows are suspect or false. Some positive reviewers seem to be insinuating that the "thought-criticisms" of us lowly experts and interested laymen should be shunted aside: what's _really_ important is how _interesting_ he makes linguistics!

Compare this to a book on physics. Suppose, in his famous 1962-63 lectures, Feynman had made a bunch of outrageous and sometimes false claims about the "state of the art" in physics. Physicists would be up in arms as these lectures were eventually made into popular intros to physics. I can imagine people like the below poo-pooing those physicists because the issue isn't accuracy but how _fun_ Feynman had made physics.

Perhaps this is all postmodernism at work. The text has no value on its own, and facts exist only for the individual. Well, bring on the dark ages, please.

Read this book... be entertained... learn that a linguist is not "someone who knows many languages," and that there's no such thing as a "primitive" human language... But please, take it all with a grain of salt.

(From someone who doesn't make a penny from alleged "grants" or anything else remotely involved with linguistics. Not that non-Chomskyans need it, since they're the ones who usually get the grant before the Chomskyans, for better or worse.)
P.S.: And Pinker is _not_ a linguist! What's wrong with you people? He's a cognitive psychologist with a fetish for his colleague's (Chomsky's) profession. There is a difference. Jeez.

Steven Pinker has written a fascinating account of how language works; how we, as listeners, process the sounds that make up words and sentences in a way that allows us to extract meaning. The book is clear, entertaining and very accessible; Pinker's writing style is witty and engaging.

My appreciation of the book is not only as a reader and enthusiast of language, but also as a writer; despite having been writing for years, and having studied numerous books on writing style and technique, it is "The Language Instinct" that positively impacted my writing more than anything else that I've read; an understanding (at least a partial one - I'm no expert) of the way your words will be parsed by the brain of your reader can be very valuable in one's attempt to write clearly and well.

I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning something new, and being entertained in the process.

Danny Iny

Author of "Ordinary Miracles - Harness the power of writing and get your point across!" (ISBN 1-4116-7252-6)

There is a wealth of useful information in this book, and it's one of the rare ones that is an easy fun read because of Pinker's writing style, approach, and real-life examples. It's not esoteric at all. Many of the concepts in this book and it's examples can be passed on to students, who occassionally ask questions in particular about English and in general about second language acquisition. One doesn't have to have an interest in language to enjoy this book. The bibliography and references to past and present researchers from a variety of disciplines are presented, from Boas to Chomsky, to biological, physiological and psychological studies. Give it a whirl.

I do not understand how other reviewers could say Pinker's idea has not been proved. It seems to me that Pinker's thesis is obviously correct, by definition.let me explain. just think about the complexity of language learning and understanding. Every computer scientists, who tries making a computer capable of understanding, knows two things for sure: 1.some abilities must be given as INNATE. Every programme must be based on some innate rules to work, such as the concept of time, of motion, of cause and effect. 2. The problem of understanding complex language is a computationally DIFFICULT one, because you have to examine many patterns , which may or may not be connected to each other, and if they are, the programme has to find the general rule to which they obey, via "abstraction" , or more precisely via a process called "induction". The computer program must also discard all the meaningless common patterns between the data samples : for example when you'll hear the word BALL and you see a red ball falling on the ground, after been thrown by a kid, the programme must understand that the colour of the ball doesn't matter, the effect that it is falling doesn't matter, that the kid doesn't matter. He can do that only after seeing many samples, and has to be capable of abstraction, induction. This capability is needed just for understanding the meaning of nouns, not to talk about the many other parts of the sentence, and what is more important, the structure of the sentence. So language understanding and world understanding are very complex problems, and the brain, although it is very slow in many other problems, solves those problem perfectly. This is very suspicious. Why do they solve those problems so efficiently? Many computer scientists will say: because the computers are sequential machines, and brains are mainly parallel computational machines, which are especially suited for that kind of problems, such as pattern recognition. But this answer is wrong, because DOG's brains are also parallel machines, but dogs don't understand language, apart from single words that any neural network can understand. So, Why is that? obviously, there must be something in the STRUCTURE of the brain - that is unique to humans- that helps understanding language. And what in the world can account for the body structure, the brain structure? Genes. What else? That is true by definition. Genes are the only thing that can account for the structural our body. So Pinker's thesis is nothing more than tautology, in my opinion. Obviously, many reviewers don't think it is tautology, so I must conclude that I have not understood their point very well, so I apologise for simplifying things too much. Please let me know what you think. I also have not finished the book so far.
Maurizio Colucci [email protected]

I stumbled upon this title last summer while searching the store for something interesting to read. Skipping over it at that point for one reason or another, however, I was again recommended this text as a supplement for a Linguistics course in which I am enrolled this fall. This is certainly no textbook in Linguistics, but it does serve as an interesting, easy-to-read work that makes contemporary, Chomsky-driven Linguistics (especially with regard to Universal Grammar and Cognitive Science) highly accessible. Pinker's writing, while sometimes manic and even unclear, still manages to captivate and seize attention easily in the same manner as other recent nonfiction texts (Malcolm Gladwell's are two such examples). With an intended audience of linguistic-laymen readers, Pinker has certainly succeeded in making boring textbook linguistics interesting, in furnishing his text with pertinent examples, and in bringing contemporary linguistics to the masses. As other reviewers have noted, one should remain skeptical and critical of Pinker's proposed theories (as is necessary with all such writing), but I would certainly recommend this text to anyone even slightly interested in the subject.

I've had a long running interest in language acquisition and the study of linguistics, and have read many of the original works by authors like Chomsky. What Pinker does, whether you agree with his conclusions or not, is to provide an excellent general overview of linguistic theories. Many linguistic texts are DULL or tortuously difficult to read. Pinker is very clear and writes quite well. He sometimes goes a bit overboard on his theory, but most of the time he's very convincing. I have not yet read the other book referred to below, but look forward to it.

I believe that some of the later reviews of "The Language Instinct" accurately reveal what generally is wrong with the positions taken here by the academic linguists who dismiss the book. Nobody points to the real problem behind these dismissals: not one of these linguists is willing to address the questions that lie at the heart of Chomsky's work in generative grammar and that instigated his work. These questions are (see p. 22, paperback ed.), and they are brilliant questions, never before asked: 1. How can we account for the fact that every human utterance is "is a brand-new combination of words?" 2. How do children, too young for formal instruction, master the essential grammatical structure of their native language? Chomsky's answer came to be generative grammar. The linguists, trapped by the Social Science Model they embrace, do not address these questions because they cannot and have no satisfactory explanation to put in its place. Until they can provide a different theory as powerful as Chomsky's they have no argument, only quibbles.
Yet having said that, I wonder whether Pinker is as successful as the enthusiastic reviews claim. Two kinds of comments, recurrent themes, as it were, suggest this. One criticism is that he presents speculation as fact. I can find not one example in 430 pages. One of the pleasures of reading this book (and it's a rare pleasure these days!) is Pinker's extremely careful use of language and his great care in weighing evidence, pointing out what is fragmentary and inconclusive but suggestive, and in telling us where he is speculating outright (as in chaps. 11 & 13). Why some reviewers misread so badly is related, I believe, to the second kind of objection.
Many complain that Pinker is "dismissive" of other points of view, that he is "unduly slanted," that he has an "agenda." These criticisms are meaningless in this context. Pinker is a scientist, and a scientist who temporizes and makes nothing but conditional statements is not writing science; he is publishing before he is sure of his data and has thought-through his conclusions; he would in fact not be published. Read Darwin's "Origin of Species." It's "slanted"? You bet, and it certainly has an "agenda"! But at the same time these complaints are deeply revealing about our present-day culture. One of Pinker's main points is that an all-pervasive extreme relativism has come to permeate our discourse at all levels. Here it manifests itself , in science, where it is entirely inappropriate: as the usual PC dogmas "Don't confront! Never dismiss! Somebody might be offended!" That way madness lies. That some reviewers failed to see that these kinds of responses were precisely what he is arguing against suggests that he may not have succeeded fully.
Finally, and briefly, one reviewer DOES attempt to confront Pinker on his own grounds, by suggesting that the adequacy of any theory can be tested by posing counterexamples. The problem is that his own examples counter nothing Pinker says. The first is impossible: "Yes, he's." Simply try to SAY that and the impossibility of that contraction is clear. One expects a completer (here; there; guilty, etc.). The second strains credulity: Anyone who is impolite enough to answer my phone call with a rude "Who's it?" produces instant confusion and a slamming hang-up. Unless . . . suppose the answerer is not in his office at the college but at home with an unlisted number. Then the likelihood is that the caller is friend, family, an intimate who recognizes this as a deliberately humorous, idiosyncratic, "in" way of saying "Hello," much as we use the words "whosis" and "whatsis" in informal situations. But these are intelligible ONLY because the standard, uncontracted forms are known in the first place.
Pinker's book is a powerful and important piece of work. Among other things, it argues subtly for the return of reasoned judgment to our everything-goes public discourse.

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.

I find it hard to believe sometimes that Stephen Pinker teaches at MIT. You mean some scientists do actually have a sense of humor? Anyone who reads this book had better have a great sense of humor, a love of the absurd, and a desire to really understand language. I'm in Science Education, not linguistics, but because I am deaf and studying how deaf people learn, it ends up with a lot of linguistic study in it. Usually the books from this lot of scientists are mind-boggling hard to get through, but not Mr. Pinker. If he teaches like he writes, then he must be a heck of a teacher! Mr. Pinker is also one of the few linguists who aren't devoted to ASL studies who includes information about American Sign Language that makes it clear that it is a real language in its own right. That alone would endear Dr. Pinker to the Deaf culture. This books takes all those difficult concepts concerning the innateness of language, and conveys them to the layman in an easy-to-understand way. He is never patronizing and always funny. I enjoy reading the book, which I often have to do since I use it in my papers a lot. To say Dr. Pinker's book is brilliant is a statement of fact. It's too bad some scientists in other fields couldn't take a cue from him and get a sense of humor! Karen L. Sadler Science Education, University of Pittsburgh, [email protected]

I have a strong interest in how language develops, and am fascinated with the debate about whether language is instinctive or learned. When you finish this book, if you are like me, you will feel quite sure it's instinctive, as the author is extremely persuasive. However, I found myself wishing a few times he would be a little less dismissive of other views than his own! This book is very well written and humerous, and unlike many books about language I have read, it doesn't simply dryly tell about a million studies.

Human language, from BEV to ASL and everything in between, is a genetically endowed by-product of human evolution, that even though it may set us apart from every other organism, it is no more unique to humans than a trunk is to an elephant or wings is to a bird. This is an essential point that Pinker makes, one that throws SSSM and other standard-setting scientists out the window, making way for the public to grasp a general understanding of the science of language.

Pinker makes language, and everything it emcompasses, accessible to the general public; with catchy chapter titles to hilarious examples and rips on "language mavens", this text is the utmost route to linguistics. Honestly, what more can up expect from a master of language? Regardless of that fast, what better way to understand Mentalese than with clear-cut examples and scientific backing? How would one scuff through morphology, phonetics, syntax, and the theory of Universal Grammer without being able to make a connection with examples from bunk-media clippings and hasty scientifically backed theories? Some may critique his wordy and lengthy style, but he/she must consider his audience. What is easier clearly expressed ideas and examples in plane ole' English or Chomsky-short-hand (p.96)?

Its Linguistics 101 with a twist. Not many people want to read dry text unless he/she has to. Pinker lightly peruses the tip of the iceberg, with explanations on Pidgin, Creole, the meaning of Standardized testing, Baby Geniuses, and theories on the origin of language, as well as fine points made by other linguistics that Pinker may not agree with, he satisfies the criteris for an introduction to language syllabus.

Language Instinct shines a bright light on a topic that is more important now and in the future than ever before, especially during a time of extreme globalization, language is the key to understanding many aspects of communication and Pinker targets a huge audience. Above all I would consider Pinker a credible and reliable source of information. And this is important, especially in this day and age, where anyone can write-off anything as fact.

However, I must say that Pinker clearly expresses the downfall of being so well-informed. It is important to draw a mental picture for one that is not so familiar with the concepts found in this book. But the fact of the matter is that tt is easy to get carried away in the nitty-gritty boroque examples that carry on for pages.

Last, perhaps Pinkers main set-back would be his theory on the language gene.

Overall, Pinker has a good grasp on his knowledge and writing style. He brings science down a notch so that the understanding of language can become accessible to those that it matters to most, everyone! This is a great introduction to Chomskian Theory. As a general advocate or good communication, Pinkers efforts to eduacte the public on language as a tool for understanding the owrld, mind, and culture should not go without notice.

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.

The Language Instinct is really well-written and enjoyable ... particularly if you are interested in linguistics and how people communicate and speak. Earlier reviews (here) have fairly explored many aspects of the book. One thing about the book astounded me:
Prof. Pinker has written over 400 pages to prove that human language is a product of an "instinct," an inborn wiring of the human brain. Time and again he refers to the design of the mind and the commonality of that design as it outcrops in human language everywhere. He extols the incredible language power of the human infant as proof of pre-born hard wiring. He even describes the extreme unlikelihood that such language faculties could occur by accident.
Then he rather furiously re-pledges his allegiance to the dogma of evolution. And to me he sounds desperate and silly in the process.
His evolutionary musings sound half-hearted and are even less well-argued. The scientist is standing on the streets of the capital of an ancient empire, looking around at complex structures still standing on paved roads, and saying, "no, I don't see any evidence of intelligent design here."
Prof. Pinker's book offers loads of evidence of intelligent design == creation == and then tries to ignore the evidence because, well, gee whiz, what would the other scientists say?
Check out pages 354-362 (hardback) to see logical muddling of the worst sort. The theory of evolution found lip service but no evidentiary support in this book.
I liked the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the subject of language -- it's really fun to read. For those interested in the question of human origins, the book is an avowed evolutionist's guide to the breathtaking wonder of creation.

The enlightened Stephen Pinker delivers a masterful compendium on linguistic theory that is truly enjoyable to read. His fine use of wit and literary fluency makes this book very enjoyable and emulates the great Richard Dawkins in the way that it seeks (and succeeds) in reaching the layman, the student, and the academician. To put it bluntly, I had never been interested in Linguistics. It seemed to be a stuffy field of repetition of high school "grammar". When assigned to read this book for a Cognitive Development Psychology course, I approached it with dread. It turned out to be the highlight of my current academic quarter. Pinker, using clean evidence to back his claims, makes some wonderful assertions about Linguistics. This book, couched in the fascinating field of evolutionary psychology, does a good job of explaining the formation and foibles of a Universal Language. He justly attacks the ridiculously ingrained Standard Social Science Model of Language and delivers a cohesive explanation from a Psychologically oriented perspective. Unlike what most critics state, Pinker does NOT say that genes are the only basis of language, but rather supports the fundamental basis of evolutionary psychology. It goes a bit like this: the environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors selected for certain genes to proliferate. These genes code us to synthesize certain proteins at certain times in our development to form certain physiological mechanisms (arms, lungs, brain, etc). Of these, he argues that the brain is not a general purpose processing tool but rather a domain specific one with an appropriate "Language Center". This causes us to have an innate mechanism for language and, therefore, an innate "Mentalese" and a Universal Grammar. HOWEVER - he also says that culture is necessary!! Without culture, one could never learn the particulars of their own language and, after a certain developmental threshold, would be without any specific language.
I apologize for the length of this endorsement. It just seemed that some possible, deconstructive critiques could seem compelling without some understanding of what Pinker was really getting at - the inherent beauty of human language and our "instinct" for it. So, if you skimmed this recommendation, know only this: "THIS BOOK IS WONDERFUL AND COVERS A GREAT RANGE AND DEPTH OF LINGUISTICS. A FUN AND INSPIRATIONAL READ".

The idea of an innate human understanding of language is pretty controversial in academic circles so don't take this without a grain of salt, but... I found Language Instinct very readable, and full of excelent examples. In particular the discussion of pidgin vs. creole languages and how quickly fully gramatical languages show up even when no "teacher" is available is striking. It definitely makes you think about the changes that take place in young brains as they pick up language cues, as well as, the seeming universals in the variety of those languages. Pinker ends with a more speculative discussion of how the brain may be thought of as a set of interacting problem solving tools, evolved over millions of years.

This book combines evolutionary theory with linguistics in an inspiring manner. I should know. It inspired me to teach myself over 20 languages and to write [my own book].
It's all about evolution. Pinker uses example after example to prove his point. When you get right down to it, we are not much different from the Chimps and Bonobos. The only thing that separates us, is our amazing ability to communicate verbally.
I applied Pinker's thinking to my own linguistic studies. And I am happy to admit that I've incorporated some of his inspiring
linguistic theories into my own personal methods for learning languages fast. I own this man big time.
Thanx Stephen for this wonderful book and for your more recent The Blank Slate.

A very thorough and thought provoking book. As a former linguistics student, I can honestly say that it would have been very useful to me when I studied linguistics at the Univ. of Alberta in Canada. Pinker can clarify complex subjects like few other people. Congrats Prof. Pinker for a well written and useful book.

Contrary to Pinkner's statement in his preface "this book is meant for everyone" this book is not a layman's read. Those who are linguist, lexicographers, grammarians and, the syntaxes word lovers will appreciate this work. At the core of Pinkner's' book is his defense of his thesis that language is biologically based. Well written, highly informative, book on the science of language. Conditionally recommended

Linguistics isn't a topic for everybody. But for those who have at least a curiosity about it, this book provides an excellent base from which to start. Pinker's focus is primarily the cognitive side of linguistics, and provides an enormous amount of data, all written with great wit and style. This particular book was written for the purpose of reaching the masses, so if you are interested in more concrete studies in cognitive linguistics, this book is not for you. Like I said, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT is a terrific jumping of point, providing many references for further reading in many other areas. It's a fun and informative read.