The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

the real engine of verbal communication is the spoken language we acquire as children.

Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it.

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. 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.

the possible variety of language is sharply limited…. The language each person acquires is a rich and complex construction hopelessly underdetermined by the fragmentary evidence available [to the child]. Nevertheless individuals in a speech community have developed essentially the same language. This fact can be explained only on the assumption that these individuals employ highly restrictive principles that guide the construction of grammar.

The universality of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is the first reason to suspect that language is not just any cultural invention but the product of a special human instinct.

Not everything that is universal is innate.

The crux of the argument is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation—not because they are taught, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can’t help it.

The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.

Chomsky reasoned that if the logic of language is wired into children, then the first time they are confronted with a sentence with two auxiliaries they should be capable of turning it into a question with the proper wording.

demonstration that normal children do not learn language by imitating their parents.

The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.

there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking.

Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

A part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning; it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules, like a chess piece or a poker chip.

Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time. Science has begun to crack the beautifully designed code that our brains use to convey complex thoughts as words and their orderings.

Grammar offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. Traces, cases, X-bars, and the other paraphernalia of syntax are colorless, odorless, and tasteless, but they, or something like them, must be a part of our unconscious mental life.

A word is the quintessential symbol. Its power comes from the fact that every member of a linguistic community uses it interchangeably in speaking and understanding. If you use a word, then as long as it is not too obscure I can take it for granted that if I later utter it to a third party, he will understand my use of it the same way I understood yours.

Though most common words have many meanings, few meanings have more than one word. That is, homonyms are plentiful, synonyms rare. (Virtually all supposed synonyms have some difference in meaning, however small.

The brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech.

Speech perception is another one of the biological miracles making up the language instinct. There are obvious advantages to using the mouth and ear as a channel of communication, and we do not find any hearing community opting for sign language, though it is just as expressive.

although language is an instinct, written language is not.

But though writing is an artificial contraption connecting vision and language, it must tap into the language system at well-demarcated points, and that gives it a modicum of logic.

Many linguists believe that the reason that languages allow phrase movement, or choices among more-or-less synonymous constructions, is to ease the load on the listener’s memory. As long as the words in a sentence can be immediately grouped into complete phrases, the sentence can be quite complex but still understandable:

Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

If lists of universals show that languages do not vary freely, do they imply that languages are restricted by the structure of the brain? Not directly. First one must rule out two alternative explanations.

One possibility is that language originated only once, and all existing languages are the descendants of that proto-language and retain some of its features.

Differences among languages are similar. There seems to be a common plan of syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules and principles, with a small set of varying parameters, like a checklist of options. Once set, a parameter can have far-reaching changes on the superficial appearance of the language.

The theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that linguistic diversity is here for a reason: “it was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly,” by creating isolated ethnic groups in which undiluted biological and cultural evolution can proceed swiftly.

Differences among languages, like differences among species, are the effects of three processes acting over long spans of time. One process is variation—mutation, in the case of species; linguistic innovation, in the case of languages. The second is heredity, so that descendants resemble their progenitors in these variations—genetic inheritance, in the case of species; the ability to learn, in the case of languages. The third is isolation—by geography, breeding season, or reproductive anatomy, in the case of species; by migration or social barriers, in the case of languages.

Even when a trait starts off as a product of learning, it does not have to remain so. Evolutionary theory, supported by computer simulations, has shown that when an environment is stable, there is a selective pressure for learned abilities to become increasingly innate.

The three-year-old child is grammatically correct in quality, not just quantity.

As far as grammar learning goes, the child must be a naturalist, passively observing the speech of others, rather than an experimentalist, manipulating stimuli and recording the results. The implications are profound. Languages are infinite, childhoods finite. To become speakers, children cannot just memorize; they must leap into the linguistic unknown and generalize to an infinite world of as-yet-unspoken sentences.

kids who are unable to learn grammar are missing a dominant gene….

Even the seat of human language in the brain is special. The vocal calls of primates are controlled not by their cerebral cortex but by phylogenetically older neural structures in the brain stem and limbic systems, structures that are heavily involved in emotion. Human vocalizations other than language, like sobbing, laughing, moaning, and shouting in pain, are also controlled subcortically.