The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

English is a zany, logic-defying tongue, in which one drives on a parkway and parks in a driveway, plays at a recital and recites at a play.

The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences was found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.

In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life.

linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.

we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran.

we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar;

The principle underlying grammar is unusual in the natural world. A grammar is an example of a “discrete combinatorial system.” A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements.

In a discrete combinatorial system like language, there can be an unlimited number of completely distinct combinations with an infinite range of properties.

Another noteworthy discrete combinatorial system in the natural world is the genetic code in DNA, where four kinds of nucleotides are combined into sixty-four kinds of codons, and the codons can be strung into an unlimited number of different genes. Many biologists have capitalized on the close parallel between the principles of grammatical combination and the principles of genetic combination. In the technical language of genetics, sequences of DNA are said to contain “letters” and “punctuation”; may be “palindromic,” “meaningless,” or “synonymous”; are “transcribed” and “translated”; and are even stored in “libraries.” The immunologist Niels Jerne entitled his Nobel Prize address “The Generative Grammar of the Immune System.”

Most of the complicated systems we see in the world, in contrast, are blending systems, like geology, paint mixing, cooking, sound, light, and weather. In a blending system the properties of the combination lie between the properties of its elements, an...

For sale: Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating.

If the verb comes before the object, as in Eat your spinach!, the child concludes that the language is head-first; if it comes after, as in Your spinach eat!, the child concludes that the language is head-last. Huge chunks of grammar are then available to the child, all at once, as if the child were merely flipping a switch to one of two possible positions. If this theory of language learning is true, it would help solve the mystery of how children’s grammar explodes into adultlike complexity in so short a time. They are not acquiring dozens or hundreds of rules; they are just setting a few mental switches.

syntax is a Darwinian “organ of extreme perfection and complication.”

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.

The idea that the human mind is designed to use abstract variables and data structures used to be, and in some circles still is, a shocking and revolutionary claim, because the structures have no direct counterpart in the child’s experience. Some of the organization of grammar would have to be there from the start, part of the language-learning mechanism that allows children to make sense out of the noises they hear from their parents. The details of syntax have figured prominently in the history of psychology, because they are a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. And that was real news.

The word glamour comes from the word grammar,

In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million!

ambimoustrous adj. Capable of operating a mouse with either hand. barfulous adj. Something that would make anyone barf. bogosity n. The degree to which something is bogus. bogotify v. To render something bogus. bozotic adj. Having the quality of Bozo the Clown. cuspy adj. Functionally elegant. depeditate v. To cut the feet off of (e.g., while printing the bottom of a page). dimwittery n. Example of a dim-witted statement. geekdom n. State of being a techno-nerd. marketroid n. Member of a company’s marketing department. mumblage n. The topic of one’s mumbling. pessimal adj. Opposite of “optimal.” wedgitude n. The state of being wedged (stuck; incapable of proceeding without help). wizardly adj. Pertaining to expert programmers.

In Boston there is an old joke about a woman who landed at Logan Airport and asked the taxi driver, “Can you take me someplace where I can get scrod?” He replied, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

A general statement of irregularity and the human condition comes from the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar: “Grammar, with its mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foretaste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience.”

Thus one precise sense of our everyday term “word” refers to the units of language that are the products of morphological rules, and which are unsplittable by syntactic rules.

By sampling from this list and testing the sample, Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school graduate knows 45,000 words—three times as many as Shakespeare managed to use! Actually, this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many common undecomposable compounds were excluded. There is no need to follow the rules of Scrabble in estimating vocabulary size; these forms are all listemes, and a person should be given credit for them. If they had been included, the average high school graduate would probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students, because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard.

Word learning generally begins around the age of twelve months. Therefore, high school graduates, who have been at it for about seventeen years, must have been learning an average of ten new words a day continuously since their first birthdays, or about a new word every ninety waking minutes.

we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words

studies by the psychologist Susan Carey have shown that if you casually slip a new color word like olive into a conversation with a three-year-old, the child will probably remember something about it five weeks later.

After all, Jessica hears her mother refer to her, Jessica, using you; why should she not think that you means “Jessica”?

hey pinker, here's a word -- fatger. the male parent, who, if you pay really close attention , can attimes be seen parenting.

the psychologist Roger Brown showed children a picture of hands kneading a mass of little squares in a bowl. If he asked them, “Can you see any sibbing?,” the children pointed to the hands. If instead he asked them, “Can you see a sib?,” they point to the bowl. And if he asked, “Can you see any sib?,” they point to the stuff inside the bowl.

Sentences and phrases are built out of words, words are built out of morphemes, and morphemes, in turn, are built out of phonemes.

to get these structures out of one head and into another, they must be converted to audible signals. The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat. The problems Mother Nature faced are digital-to-analog conversion when the talker encodes strings of discrete symbols into a continuous stream of sound, and analog-to-digital conversion when the listener decodes continuous speech back into discrete symbols.

In Japanese, in contrast, an onset can have only a single consonant and a rime must be a bare vowel; hence strawberry ice cream is translated as sutoroberi aisukurimo, girlfriend garufurendo.

A succession of feet with a strong-weak pattern is a trochaic meter, as in Mary had a little lamb; a succession with a weak-strong pattern is iambic, as in The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

Dorothy Parker once replied to a question about why she had not been at the symphony lately by saying “I’ve been too fucking busy and vice versa.”

short-term memory is the primary bottleneck in human information processing.

Only a few items—the usual estimate is seven, plus or minus two—can be held in the mind at once, and the items are immediately subject to fading or being overwritten.

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.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. American bison are called buffalo. A kind of bison that comes from Buffalo, New York, could be called a Buffalo buffalo. Recall that there is a verb to buffalo that means “to overwhelm, to intimidate.” Imagine that New York State bison intimidate one another: (The) Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo (often) buffalo (in turn) buffalo (other) Buffalo buffalo.

In an ingenious experiment, the psycholinguist David Swinney had people listen over headphones to passages like the following: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of his room. Did you notice that the last sentence contains an ambiguous word, bug, which can mean either “insect” or “surveillance device”? Probably not; the second meaning is more obscure and makes no sense in context. But psycholinguists are interested in mental processes that last only milliseconds and need a more subtle technique than just asking people. As soon as the word bug had been read from the tape, a computer flashed a word on a screen, and the person had to press a button as soon as he or she had recognized it. (Another button was available for nonwords like blick.) It is well known that when a person hears one word, any word related to it is easier to recognize, as if the mental dictionary is organized like a thesaurus, so that when one word is found, others similar in meaning are more readily available. As expected, people pressed the button faster when recognizing ant, which is related to bug, than when recognizing sew, which is unrelated. Surprisingly, people were just as primed to recognize the word spy, which is, of course, related to bug, but only to the meaning that makes no sense in the context. It suggests that the brain knee-jerkingly activates b...

Conversation out of context is virtually opaque.

remember Peter Gordon’s experiments showing that children say mice-eater but never rats-eater, despite the conceptual similarity of rats and mice and despite the absence of either kind of compound in parents’ speech.

the English -ed suffix may have evolved from did: hammer-did hammered.

The wide-scale extinction of languages is reminiscent of the current (though less severe) wide-scale extinction of plant and animal species. The causes overlap. Languages disappear by the destruction of the habitats of their speakers, as well as by genocide, forced assimilation and assimilatory education, demographic submersion, and bombardment by electronic media, which Krauss calls “cultural nerve gas.”

We are in danger of losing treasures ranging from Yiddish, with far more words for “simpleton” than the Eskimos were reputed to have for “snow,” to Damin, a ceremonial variant of the Australian language Lardil, which has a unique 200-word vocabulary that is learnable in a day but that can express the full range of concepts in everyday speech.

During the first year, babies also get their speech production systems geared up. First, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. A newborn has a vocal tract like a nonhuman mammal. The larynx comes up like a periscope and engages the nasal passage, forcing the infant to breathe through the nose and making it anatomically possible to drink and breathe at the same time. By three months the larynx has descended deep into the throat, opening up the cavity behind the tongue (the pharynx) that allows the tongue to move forwards and backwards and produce the variety of vowel sounds used by adults.

Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instruction manual. In such situations people resort to what hackers call frobbing—fiddling aimlessly with the controls to see what happens. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with wildly varying effects on the sound. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move which muscle in which way to make which change in the sound. This

The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius—master of most constructions, obeying rules far more often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether. How do they do it?