The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 · rating details · 6,642 ratings · 424 reviews

In this classic study, the world's leading expert on language and the mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about languages: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it envolved. With wit, erudition, and deft use it everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of languag...more

Paperback, 544 pages

Published November 7th 2000 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published 1994)

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Jun 14, 2012 Manny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics-and-philosophy

There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies.

"Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you can get scrod here?"

And the driver replies, "You know, you don't often hear that in the pluperfect subjunctive!"

__________________________________________

Another linguist joke, for people who haven't...more

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Jun 02, 2010 Nicholas rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biology, psychology

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Very interesting. Too long and technical for me. Most of the stuff I didn't care about. Not a criticism of the book but just a mismatch of interest.

Middle was boring. Writing was good. Sharp style. Insults fools and posers. Funny. Charming. The perfect example is the beginning of chapter 11 pg 340. This is the way to argue. Funny, ridiculing, forceful and gets the message across.

His metaphors are really good. Aspire to this.

Language is built into the mind. It evolved by natural selection. It is...more

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Feb 25, 2009 Tyas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: language, general-science, biology

A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.
“I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”

That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task...more A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.
“I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”

That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task of learning a new language bewildering, bordering with the impossible. Plus, children are not just great imitators. If they were, we would only be repeating things our parents had told us when we were small. But we don’t. We don’t just mimic our parents’ words. Something in our neural circuitry does more than just copying; it analyses grammar, it finds for pattern, it composes new combination of words... frighteningly complex processes that, so far, cannot even be matched by the most advanced of AI. C3PO is still a long way to go.

The ability of learning language is one of the many subjects covered by the book The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist in Harvard. (No, he’s not some crazy linguist who enjoys slaying people.)

Language is probably the hallmark of human race. We boast our ability to communicate in words, a feature of our culture that no other living forms have. But Pinker shows us that far from being a cultural invention, language is actually an instinct. And because it is, then despite the doubts of the likes of Chomsky, it must be built gradually in the lineages one of which led to us thanks to natural selection. Aiming towards the goal of convincing us about that main point of language being an instinct, Pinker wove an abundance of evidence into this clear, mostly easy-to-swallow book. I said most, because to be frank at times I was lost among a wealth of linguistic terms that I had to crawl through, trying to just grab the general point of some parts.

Nevertheless, I like Pinker’s book for dissecting language thoroughly. My favourite part is of course about the language mavens – people who think they have the task to safeguard the purity of language and grammar. Pinker showed us that many instances of ‘ungrammatical’ words or sentences according to those mavens, are actually grammatical according to how our brain works. Very enlightening, especially for someone like me who has for quite some time lost her faith in the tyranny of KBBI and EYD of the Indonesian language. (Our own language mavens, for instance, would waste their sweat telling us that the correct spelling for ‘lembab’ is ‘lembap’, though you understand that both mean the same anyway, and that you may not speak of ‘jam delapan’, but ‘pukul delapan’ instead.)

But hey, if this sounds like telling us to ditch our dictionaries and standard spellings and pronunciation altogether, what am I doing, writing something in what, I hope, is a neat piece of review, instead 0f sumth1n l1k3 d33s? (You might even notice that I even care to hit the spacebar twice after a period, but only once after a comma.)

Well, when I talk with my sister and brother, or with my bestfriends, sometimes we use words and phrases only we understand. (I wager none of you know what an ‘exedol’ is.) Sometimes we don’t even have to finish our sentences. Our experience together has created specific words and phrases and shaped the language that we use when we communicate with each other. But, when I write something, keeping a general reader in mind, I must be careful to use words and phrases most, if not all, readers would understand, presenting my thought clearly, preventing misunderstanding or confusion (except if that is exactly my intention, but Joyce I am not). Hence my writing style – but trust me, in verbal communication, I might sound very, very different.

Language is far more interesting than filling up blanks on a question sheet with the right form of verbs, and Steven Pinker has a way of revealing to us how amazing our language and our brain are.

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Jun 24, 2009 Emanuela rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Elena in particular; in general, to anyone interested in the dynamics of language

Shelves: compulsory-readings, continuous-learning, language-learning, read-in-english

I have barely started it but I'm loving it already. I'll be back with a much more enriched review once I've finished it.

Now that I have finished it (about two weeks ago) I can finally write something more about it.

To begin with, I must confess I have had a few troubles finishing this book, but simply because I've fallen so in love with it that it really cost me a lot to end it.

The Language Instinct has definitely made it to the top three list of my all time favorite books. Written in an informa...more

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Sep 18, 2008 Mark rated it 3 of 5 stars

A book that tells you all that you might want to know about how humans are able to communicate with language. Pinker praises the work of Chomsky and tries to show that the fundamentals of language are built into the human mind, an instinct that is refined by our natural surroundings. He gives many examples of a fundamental grammar that all humans speaking whatever language have, which they use to organize sentences in their own language even if the sentence structures of two different languages...more

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Aug 11, 2008 Arthur rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Arthur by: my Spanish Linguistics professor

Shelves: science, language

This is a must-read for anyone interested in how language works. As the title would indicate, Pinker argues that language is an instinct and that our brains come pre-programmed with a Universal Grammar and an innate capacity to fill in the blanks with the specific grammatical rules and vocabulary we hear people use around us.

He also describes the basics of the modern science of language developed by Noam Chomsky and his followers, and although this section is a little technical, it is well wort...more

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Jul 22, 2008 Chris Friend rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone interested in how the mind works or in the way humans use language

Recommended to Chris by: Ben Tolman

This one was recommended to me by Ben, and he was spot-on in thinking that I would find it both interesting and enlightening. I cracked open the book thinking that it was going to be just another discussion of linguistics, but it ended up dealing a heckuvalot more with neurology and human behavior, drawing particular attention to the interesting tendencies that we humans have built-in for the construction, use, and comprehension of spoken language.

The author seems quite fair in his broad-based a...more

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Mar 02, 2010 E rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: language-linguistics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Pinker is entertaining as he explains the basic tenets of language development for laypeople or beginning students of linguistics. He argues that humans do indeed have an instinct for language - for grammar, to be specific - unparalleled in other species, as one-of-a-kind as the elephant's trunk. This instinct driven by nature prevails over environmental or nuturing factors, though one can't take that argument too literally. Obviously, whether a baby speaks English or Zulu is determined by the f...more Pinker is entertaining as he explains the basic tenets of language development for laypeople or beginning students of linguistics. He argues that humans do indeed have an instinct for language - for grammar, to be specific - unparalleled in other species, as one-of-a-kind as the elephant's trunk. This instinct driven by nature prevails over environmental or nuturing factors, though one can't take that argument too literally. Obviously, whether a baby speaks English or Zulu is determined by the family and community, but many so-called "mistakes" children make in grammar are proof of the brain's perseverance in calculating sentences correctly.

My main disagreement with Pinker's argument relates to the beloved pasttime of descriptive linguists to bash "the language mavens" - i.e., teachers and writers who criticize certain styles of speech and writing. He is right that language is man-made; it is always changing and always will change. Every big change creates a dialect and no dialect is "wrong" or "right." Linguists can certainly contribute to socio-political progress in proving that Southern dialect, Ebonics, and the Queen's English are all grammatically consistent and equally rife with potential for creative expression. However, to argue that all languages change and therefore no one should care one way or another what is spoken where or when is dangerously libertine, for it ignores the significance of social subtlety and the value of skilled oratory and writing.

If one uses a youth dialect variant at a job interview or a conference with the word "like" inserted before every adjective, verb, and noun, "it will kill the pathos," as a professor of mine once said. Likewise, if one uses the Queen's English at a rave, you will be kindly asked to remove the pole from thine ass, and rightly so. Both linguists and writers should recognize that no language is ultimately superior to the other, but that social constructs do dictate what sort of language will be received well in what sort of context and to dismiss these rules is indeed to demonstrate social and aesthetic ignorance and/or arrogance. (See EATS SHOOTS AND LEAVES by Lynne Truss for more on that.)

Some professors have dismissed Pinker's book as pop science, whereas others are of course excited about his giving the subject popular appeal. I've taken courses on linguistics, but I'm not a linguist, so I found it to be neither patronizing nor elite.

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Feb 02, 2013 Erwin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: educate-kids

Couldn't put it down. Another interesting set of insights by Mr Pinker.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"
-Max Weinreich

There are developed and underdeveloped economies, but there is no such thing as an underdeveloped grammar. All people, everywhere in the world, speak with a grammar of equal complexity. We (including myself!) hear blacks in the US use very strange "uneducated" sounding english. As a matter of fact, the black population has their own dialect inherited from the days...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Jon Stout rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: neurophilosophers and naturalists

Shelves: linguistics

In this very entertaining book, Steven Pinker has given a kind of overview and popularization of contemporary linguistics, as developed by Noam Chomsky. He argues that there is a language instinct, developed through evolution, which shapes how any human being acquires language. This is in opposition to the idea that we are blank slates, perhaps very intelligent blank slates, who learn everything from our environment and our culture. The Chomskyan idea is that all human languages have certain bas...more In this very entertaining book, Steven Pinker has given a kind of overview and popularization of contemporary linguistics, as developed by Noam Chomsky. He argues that there is a language instinct, developed through evolution, which shapes how any human being acquires language. This is in opposition to the idea that we are blank slates, perhaps very intelligent blank slates, who learn everything from our environment and our culture. The Chomskyan idea is that all human languages have certain basic structures, such as noun phases and verb phrases, which small children seem to understand even as they acquire their native language. These structures are innate, according to Chomsky and Pinker, and are part of an instinct or natural capability for language which results from evolution.

Pinker engages in a wide-ranging discussion of language which covers everything from phonetics, the inventory of raw sounds that are available to the human larynx, to language mavens, the self-described experts on language who want to be the arbiters of good grammar. I found the whole discussion fascinating, and I am trying to internalize the basics of Chomsky’s approach, so that I can go on to read some more technical linguistics.

A couple of issues engaged me. One was the debate between a prescriptive approach to language and a descriptive approach, between those who argue that there is a grammatically correct way to speak (the way we ought to speak), and those who say that linguistics only describes how people actually use language. Pinker inveighs against the prescriptivists, saying that even small children have an instinct to use appropriate grammatical structures. He makes fun of the shibboleths of grammarians, such as not splitting infinitives, offering in each case an argument as to why the supposedly ungrammatical phrase exhibits an inherent grammatical sense.

I’m not sure the boundary between prescriptive and descriptive approaches is so clear. If I am learning Spanish, say, then I want to know the rules for when to use the subjunctive. Those rules are normative, prescriptive, for me, even if there is some logic to whatever mistakes I make. Pinker could say that the rules are normative only in a hypothetical sense, that they are contingent on my wanting to speak like a native. But of course I do want to speak any acquired language, or my own language, as well and as effectively as possible. So, for practical purposes, grammar can be prescriptive as well as descriptive.

Another bone of contention actually occurs between Pinker and Chomsky. Pinker argues that our language instinct is based on evolution. Chomsky has said that scientific factors other than evolution may have determined how we acquire language. To explain Chomsky, Pinker offers the example of a fish jumping out of the water and diving back in. Evolution may have developed the capacity to jump out of the water, but gravity determines that the fish will return to water. A linguistic example might be that acoustics, more than evolution, may have determined the inventory of sounds available to use in language. Pinker seems puzzled by Chomsky’s point, and specifically disagrees with it.

My take is that there may be logical constraints on how language is acquired. Logic is a kind of science, like mathematics, but different from the empirical sciences. The grammatical structure of languages may have something in common with the logical structure of arguments. Perhaps there is no logical alternative to sentences containing a noun phrase and a verb phrase. If that is the case, then to that extent the constraint on language is logical and not evolutionary, although of course the two work hand in hand. I will have to read more to discover if my interpretation of Chomsky is plausible.
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Nov 28, 2012 Maggie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, on-language

the aspects of this book that detail language is excellent. the evolutionary tie-ins are stretches that are best-guesses but far from experientially proven connections. so if you love language, you will indeed enjoy this book. but a cautionary word: don't forget those critical reading skills so you don't swallow the long-stretch evolutionary wishing-is-believing ... in neuroscience and technology, the more the scientists find out, the more questions are raised. so the more they know, the more th...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Lauren Ruth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-favorites

In 1974–75, I wrote my thesis at Reed College on the topic of the biological foundations for language. Alas, I had neither the wit nor the gumption to title it The Language Instinct. Wish I had.

Odd though it sounds now, at the time the assertion that language was innate was a controversial idea. Behaviorists held sway. The operant conditioning model of behavior does explain a great deal—yes, absent other factors, people tend to do more of what gets rewarded and less of what gets punished. But it...more

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May 01, 2011 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I had The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.

The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to...more I had The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.

The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to acquire language instinctively. Whether we are born into an English or Kinyarwandan or sign-language community affects only the details of our language acquisition - we are wired to understand the way language works.

He makes many good points, and I learned a lot from reading this book, but something underlying the text was somewhat disturbing to me (and it's not just the way he seems to revere Noam Chomsky as a god, quoting him earnestly and often, and almost overemphasizing the one point where he disagrees with Chomsky as if to say, "Look, all you people who think I'm just digesting Chomsky for the masses - I DO have my own thoughts! So there!"). It's that Pinker is 100% an objectivist, believing that our language and culture don't really affect the underlying processes in our minds and that human beings are ultimately the same, whereas I can't see the world without some degree of relativity slipping in, thinking that we are all very very similar and are justified in acting as if we are all the same, but that there are subtle differences that we may not entirely be able to overcome. I think lanugage, at least to a small degree, does affect the way we think and process the world, even if the differences are mostly ones we can see past or work around when talking with others from a different language background.

(I laughed every time I turned the book over and saw the quote on the back from William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Steven Pinker is, I think, engagingly wrong in some of his conclusions, but the operative word here is engagingly. He reminds us of the pleasures of reading about language, provided people like him are at the wheel.")

A few details I really enjoyed about this book: Case studies and quotes from people with various neurological disorders affecting their language abilities. The detail to which Pinker addressed sign languages, showing how language acquisition follows the same steps whether it is spoken or gestured (deaf babies "babble" with their hands at the same age that hearing babies babble with their mouths). The linguistics primers, which had me making phoneme sounds and sticking my finger in my mouth to see how my tongue and lips were arranged (while on the train!). Reasons why the "language mavens" (people who bemoan the decline of English) are often wrong.

This is definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested in linguistics but haven't studied much on the topic yet. There's a lot of value in this book, even though some passages do get overwhelmingly dry or pedantic (pages of sentence diagramming scattered throughout the book, for example). I wouldn't recommend it to a casual reader, since I kind of had to will myself to finish reading the book, but I do think I learned a lot for sticking it out. (less)

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Jan 29, 2011 Steve Bradshaw rated it 5 of 5 stars

After a slow start, this book comes alive mid-way through when Pinker moves beyond the universal syntax of all languages to talk about the innate language abilities we are born with and how language, speech and hearing function within the brain.

This book is rich with anecdotes and interesting facts. For instance no tribe has been discovered in modern times that didn't have a developed language equal in complexity to our so-called modern languages. Or, if a person is only exposed to language aft...more

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Oct 02, 2010 Aurochz rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: psychology, neuorscience-evolution, science, linguistics

I want to say one thing about this before I go on. I agree with this books central thesis that language is instinctual or has a genetic starting point within our biological context. My problem with this book is his writing style and his argumentative style.

At the start of this book he addresses a few chapters that are only loosely affiliated with the main core of his argumentation which really kicks off around the middle of the book. In one of the early chapters he says that motherese and most...more I want to say one thing about this before I go on. I agree with this books central thesis that language is instinctual or has a genetic starting point within our biological context. My problem with this book is his writing style and his argumentative style.

At the start of this book he addresses a few chapters that are only loosely affiliated with the main core of his argumentation which really kicks off around the middle of the book. In one of the early chapters he says that motherese and most of linguistics in regard to early language acquisition is false and then later in the book confirms both its use and said basic facts about linguistics. Now in all fairness he is trying to show that motherese is not necessary for the grammar aspects of language which in his theory would be a natural aspect of of our genetics. What he doesn't tell you is that motherese and early language acquisition is still very important for learning words and being able to understand words before we lose our initial neuroplasticity in regards to the upper part of our brains.

He seems to marginalize obvious environmental aspects of language. As stated earlier with language acquisition he fails to point out that feral or neglected children who are not spoken too lose the chance to really understand language in the way that most people do. He mentions this later in the book, but divorced from the fundamental environmental aspect of it. He also in attempting to debunk the Sapir Whorf hypothesis goes against the strong claim that words and thoughts are the same thing. While I agree that words are not thoughts and that we have an obvious biological contingent to our thought process. What I disagree with is that language is not a necessary ingredient or prerequisite for what we consider thoughts. His example of a blind man and young children are non sequiturs because he fails to distinguish between instincts and thoughts. The activities he described these people engaging in are what most animals can do. Most humans fall back on animal like behaviors in the absence of an adequate social context early in life or more specifically language.

Further on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis again while the strong claim of linguistic determinism is false. The weaker claim that language in the absence of other languages can color our thoughts and conceptions is true to some extent. The Piraha tribe have no conception of colors or numbers, because their language has no words for them. Many Asian cultures have no word for art or love, a lot of language lack subjective terms of this nature and their conception of them is never quite as elaborate as people who do grow up with them even after they are told about it.

Again I agree with a lot of what he has to say on basic linguistics, the mind and evolution are correct for the most part. I would also agree with an inherited grammatical structuring. What I would not agree with is that this renders most of the environmental aspects of language negligible he brushes aside most of these claims without really addressing them.

His theory also lacks a central aspect that I think is crucial for a evolutionary theory of language. He brings up Quines "Gavagai problem," the basic problem goes like this when trying to explain what a "gavagai" is a person starts randomly pointing at a rabbit to try and get a person who knows another language to understand what they're saying unfortunately around them there are such things as rocks, plants of all kinds, the finger itself a whole number of objects the person could be talking about. Now lets consider the very start of language imagine a world with no words, no frame of reference, but a biological capacity to emit them. With all his hard arguing he has failed to show how an initial referent could of developed evolutionarily. I'm not saying that it cant be shown this way, but if our want is to find the origin of language you think this would have been more of a central aspect of his search. I believe that an initial referent would have to be genetic, the starting point of language is biological that I don't doubt, but I have seen very little in the way of theories for this. Especially not in this book.

Despite my harsh criticisms of this book it is still a necessary read to understanding the current state of linguistics and evolutionary psychology. For that I would recommend it, but with the caveat that people not take all his claims at face value. Environment still has much more of a role than he would like to think. (less)

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Sep 02, 2009 Billie Pritchett rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I was really surprised by this book. Pinker surveys some of the major research programs in linguistics, including in cases of overlap with fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. The book also provides several arguments in attempt to explain why it is that linguists pursue certain kinds of research programs. For example, the influence of Noam Chomsky's argument for a Universal Grammar is analyzed, and with Pinker's elucidations, seems to be a well-justified research program. The...more

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Aug 15, 2009 Max Maxwell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone who wants to refute linguistic determinism

Recommended to Max by: Can't recall at the moment

Shelves: evolution, linguistics, 50-book-challenge-2009-failed-48

This review is edition-specific. Excellent, if highly abridged, reading of the famous popularization of linguistic nativism. Lalla Ward, Richard Dawkins's wife and once an actress on Doctor Who, is well known among those who like science audiobooks for her contributions to the audio versions of her husband's The God Delusion and The Ancestor's Tale . Her reading here is characteristically lively, and of course, the material leaves nothing to be desired. Especially good was that one interview wi...more

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Dec 28, 2010 Koen Crolla rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is throug...more Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is through defending them, because he understands neither the ideas nor any arguments in their favour.
As an example, do you remember the argument Dawkins once made, possibly in The Blind Watchmaker, about how very small changes can accumulate and turn into very significant results in a relatively small amount of time? He used a hypothetical population of mice that grew in average size by one percent every generation, and showed that within a few thousand generations — a mere couple of millennia! — those mice would be the size of elephants. Pinker tries to use this same story to show that small *selection pressures* can have significant results quickly:

> ``Imagine a mouse that was subject to a miniscule selection pressure for increased size—say, one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse's descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.''

Which is obviously fractally incoherent, as he would have realised if he'd understood Dawkins's argument instead of just trying to repeat it to try to get a good review by him for the back cover (which he got), or even just tried to do said arithmetic. The sad part is that what he set out to argue is actually true; his bungled argument just undermined it.
This is par for the course (there are more egregious examples, but this one stuck because it's Dawkins), and Pinker repeatedly fucks over his main thesis — that language is instinctive, which was as uncontroversial in 1994, when the book was written, as it is now — in the same way. Worse than that, though, he then tries to pretend that arguments in favour of this thesis mean that language is *nothing but* instinctive and, incidentally, uniquely human, and that ``therefore'' everything from linguistic prescriptivism to animal language to Sapir-Whorf to being interested in etymology is completely and utterly wrong-headed and obviously moronic, which he tries to back up by attacking caricatures of these things or, not infrequently, the character of the people involved.

Anyway, other people have apparently done thorough jobs of taking apart The Language Instict, so I won't waste any more time on it. Not everything he says is wrong (stopped clocks and all that), and it's a lot like Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind in that some of the digressions are interesting enough, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so pathetically low that the book as a whole isn't worth your time. Read Chomsky instead; Pinker would claim he's saying the same things he is anyway, which demonstrates just how confused he is.
Maybe it's just because TLI is his first book. Elsewhere in my to-read stack is his most recent one, The Stuff of Thought; we'll see how it compares. I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately, the problem isn't that he was new to writing, because he wasn't; it's that he's a psychologist, and not a real scientist.(less)

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Sep 15, 2012 Mustafa A. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

As you are reading this review, you are experiencing one of nature's most fascinating things: language. (It's a sort of semi-parody of the first sentence of the book).

Let me tell you this. When a bunch of reviews say that a book is funny, it turns out I never laugh. I did not laugh reading Don Quixote, Catch-22, or even Mark Twain's stuff. So, you can say I am a humorless jerk. And, it just so happens that the first book I actually laugh out loud at is a book about linguistics, of all things.

And...more As you are reading this review, you are experiencing one of nature's most fascinating things: language. (It's a sort of semi-parody of the first sentence of the book).

Let me tell you this. When a bunch of reviews say that a book is funny, it turns out I never laugh. I did not laugh reading Don Quixote, Catch-22, or even Mark Twain's stuff. So, you can say I am a humorless jerk. And, it just so happens that the first book I actually laugh out loud at is a book about linguistics, of all things.

And, just because a book is a popular science book does not mean you're going to find some 14-year old reading this book. Yet, somehow, I'm 14, I love science, and I read (and really loved) this book.

I must admit that language is definitely something we're all fascinated by, yet we can never get satisfactory answers for our questions about language. After all, this is science we're talking about, and science can never really end because the things nature has dreamed up of are so complex, yet so purposeful.

Never mind that. Let's get on to the book. This is the first book by Steven Pinker that I have read and if all of his books are like this, then he has just garnered himself another fan. Within two days, I had finished this book. Okay, so maybe that's a little bit biased because I am a fast reader.

I have actually gained an insight and understood how language and our mind are actually connected, as well as knowing more about some of the greatest linguists ever (for example: Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and especially, Noam Chomsky).

However, I shall also admit that this book does not give all the answers to our language ability, but it gives a good insight of what might be possible. Also, it is not just about linguistics. Rather, it also crosses over fields such as psychology, biology, physics, etc.

Steven Pinker may sometimes use some technical words, but they're not used in a way that is impossible to decipher. He is sort of like the Edward O. Wilson of neuroscience.

Read and prepare to be enlightened.(less)

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Jul 28, 2009 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: cogsci, science, mind, lazy-summer-reading

it's hard to say what possessed me to read this book now of all times. some people will know that i've read most of ray jackendoff's Patterns in the Mind, which covers a lot of the same ground, and i've also taken/audited courses on semantic/syntactic theory with ray, so why read pinker?

while confirming a lot of things any casual student of cognitive/psycho-linguistics will already know by now, pinker is still definitely worth reading, and in this book he's at his finest. he explains the basic i...more

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May 30, 2012 Ray Campbell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012

In the Silent Language, the classic treatise on culture and of anthropology, Edward T. Hall explains the expression and communication of culture including language - Pinker would differ. Far from being an expression of culture, Pinker argues that recent research points to the idea that language is hard wired. He explains that we have innate tendencies and capabilities that manifest based on context but that these manifestations of a language capability in humans follows uniform and predictable p...more

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Oct 09, 2010 Andrew added it

Shelves: scientific-nonfiction

Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.

When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogita...more Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.

When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogitating on the structure of Creole languages and the speech patterns of aphasics, he makes a very, very strong case for a universal grammar. While there are suggestions that certain features of universal aren't present in some languages, it seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. I will say, as an arch-empiricist and an arch-skeptic, that there's a very strong chance that grammatical structures quite likely have a social rather than a strictly evolutionary basis, but the idea is certainly thought-provoking. And, importantly for us moody relativists, he has convinced me (in a way that Peter Singer totally didn't) of the democratic potential of the notion of innate human nature.

I do feel that he utilizes a certain circular logic. In Pinker's view, morphemes fit into the framework of syntax, and therefore language is innate. What is a morpheme? Something that fits into the framework of syntax. Also, he largely relies on generalizations rather than universals.

Oh, and he claims signifiers are arbitrary, even in the case of onomatopoeia. And yet he tries to claim that certain signifiers are non-arbitrary because we evolved in certain ways. This is just a glaring example that implies, to me, that Pinker used his data to fit his conclusion. Bad science booohissss.

But while these problems call into question his work and method, it's still a work I have the utmost respect for, and that everyone interested in language, whether liquored-up French deconstructionist or icy positivist, needs to read.(less)

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Mar 10, 2012 Lalinilla rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Pfanner

Recommended to Lalinilla by: Christoph Ehlers

Shelves: en-inglés, no-ficción

Cuando una persona tiene que leer un libro obligatoriamente para una asignatura de su carrera y, varios años más tarde, vuelve a releer el mismo libro por placer, es que de verdad merece la pena. Este es mi caso con Pinker y su Instinto del lenguaje. Gracias, Christoph Ehlers, por un magnífico programa de Introducción a la Lingüística.

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Nov 28, 2012 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Overall I think this was a good book. It was a bit dated in places, but I think all that really suffered was the pop culture references and examples. The theory and research examples held up.

I enjoyed how the author gave examples and explained theories that were broader than language to put his language thesis in context. I did not particularly enjoy how the author gave 15 examples for each type of phrasing he was referencing. I get it after one or two. I was listening to an audiobook version, s...more

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Mar 16, 2011 Scarlett Sims rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: leisure, real, science, scholarly

I originally bought this book as supplemental reading for one of my linguistics classes, but didn't read the whole thing at that point. Then I saw Steven Pinker speak and so when I found this book at my parents house I decided to give it a go.

In the past, I have been known to down-rate scientific books if they are outdated. I am definitely interested in reading some of Pinker's more recent stuff but this book was great. I think one of his biggest strengths as a writer, speaker, and scholar is hi...more

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Aug 24, 2009 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's only appropriate that a book about language be written engagingly, and Steven Pinker is very fun to "listen" to. He lays out the evidence for a hard-wired ability for languages built into the structure of human brains (physically residing in the perisylvian region where Wernicke's and Broca's areas are), and livens things up with interesting examples from the scientific literature (kids are grammar geniuses) and fun quotes from sources from newspapers to Shakespeare. I appreciated his spiri...more

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May 06, 2013 Diana Sandberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Pretty good. Lots of really interesting stuff and a well-presented, well-supported argument for his premise that language learning is an instinct in humans as web-building is in spiders. I could take issue with him on a couple of minor points but on the whole I found it quite reasonable. There were also two or three places where the discussion got mired in overly technical minutiae and I nearly ground to a halt but did carry on and was glad of it. I enjoyed his perspective on “talking” chimpanze...more

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May 25, 2012 Samuel Proulx rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

At first, I thought that this book would appeal mostly to language geeks, the kind of people who speak 11 languages, and are working on number 12. Fortunately, I decided to give it a chance, even though I'm not at all that sort of person. The appeal of this book is much, much wider than just polyglots and linguists. If you're interested in nonsense in the style of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, you should read this book. If you're interested in wordplay, you should read this book. If you're inter...more

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Sep 21, 2011 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't often read something that actually changes the way I understand my world. I've been aware of Noam Chomsky's name and have vaguely associated it with a poorly understood and not-at-all-subscribed-to-by-me notion of an innate "universal grammar" for a long time. I was one of the kind of people discussed in this book, who believe that thought itself depends on language. I subscribed to what Pinker calls "The Standard Social Science Model" of absolute cultural relativism. While already a "de...more

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Dec 06, 2012 Donna Woodwell rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a fabulous overview of linguistics for the non-linguist. Not exactly light reading, though Pinker's dry humor makes it fun. His basic premise is that language is an evolutionary adaptation of humans to communicate information, just like wings are an adaptation of birds to fly, or gills for a fish to breathe underwater. For that I think he makes the case well. He's also very much anti-cultural relativism (one of my favorite quotes is: "I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than anyth...more

1 like · like · see review

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About Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven b...more Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a school psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.

He is currently working on an upcoming book about the evolution of human morality, specifically focusing on "the historical decline of violence and its psychological roots" as stated by the author himself on the Harvard website.(less)

More about Steven Pinker...

Books by Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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“Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster,” — 3 people liked it

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.” — 2 people liked it

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