The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts.

famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of 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 have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a “what we meant to say” that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

although physicists see no basis for color boundaries, physiologists do. Eyes do not register wavelength the way a thermometer registers temperature. They contain three kinds of cones, each with a different pigment, and the cones are wired to neurons in a way that makes the neurons respond best to red patches against a green background or vice versa, blue against yellow, black against white. No matter how influential language might be, it would seem preposterous to a physiologist that it could reach down into the retina and rewire the ganglion cells.

If a language has only two color words, they are for black and white (usually encompassing dark and light, respectively). If it has three, they are for black, white, and red; if four, black, white, red, and either yellow or green. Five adds in both yellow and green; six, blue; seven, brown; more than seven, purple, pink, orange, or gray.

subjects remembered the chips in two forms, a nonverbal visual image and a verbal label, presumably because two kinds of memory, each one fallible, are better than one.

the farther the subjects had to mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of 56 RPM.

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 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.”

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.

There is a connection between concepts and part-of-speech categories, but it is a subtle and abstract one.

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 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.

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.”

Though most common words have many meanings, few meanings have more than one word.

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 both entries for bug, even though one of them could sensibly be ruled out beforehand. The irrelevant meaning is not around long: if the test word appeared on the screen three syllables after bugs instead of right after it, then only ant was recognized quickly; spy was no longer any faster than sew.

The act of communicating relies on a mutual expectation of cooperation between speaker and listener.

When we put words into people’s ears we are impinging on them and revealing our own intentions, honorable or not, just as surely as if we were touching them.

Learning is an option, like camouflage or horns, that nature gives organisms as needed—when some aspect of the organisms’ environmental niche is so unpredictable that anticipation of its contingencies cannot be wired in.

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 pressure to replace learned neural connections with innate ones diminishes as more and more of the network becomes innate, because it becomes less and less likely that learning will fail for the rest.

although grammars change quickly through history, they do not degenerate, for reanalysis is an inexhaustible source of new complexity. Nor must they progressively differentiate, for grammars can hop among the grooves made available by the universal grammar in everyone’s mind.

many of the signatures of modern English syntax were the result of a chain of effects beginning with a simple shift in pronunciation.

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. We know that the connection is easily severed, thanks to the genetic experiments called immigration and conquest, in which children get their grammars from the brains of people other than their parents.

It’s just that one can trace words back only so far. It is like the man who claimed to be selling Abraham Lincoln’s ax—he explained that over the years the head had to be replaced twice and the handle three times. Most linguists believe that after 10,000 years no traces of a language remain in its descendants. This makes it extremely doubtful that anyone will find extant traces of the most recent ancestor of all contemporary languages, or that that ancestor would in turn retain traces of the language of the first modern humans, who lived some 200,000 years ago.

As natural selection designed organisms, it must have been faced with countless choices among features that involved different tradeoffs of costs and benefits at different ages. Some materials might be strong and light but wear out quickly, whereas others might be heavier but more durable. Some biochemical processes might deliver excellent products but leave a legacy of accumulating pollution within the body. There might be a metabolically expensive cellular repair mechanism that comes in most useful late in life when wear and tear have accumulated. What does natural selection do when faced with these tradeoffs? In general, it will favor an option with benefits to the young organism and costs to the old one over an option with the same average benefit spread out evenly over the life span. This asymmetry is rooted in the inherent asymmetry of death. If a lightning bolt kills a forty-year-old, there will be no fifty-year-old or sixty-year-old to worry about, but there will have been a twenty-year-old and a thirty-year-old. Any bodily feature designed for the benefit of the potential over-forty incarnations, at the expense of the under-forty incarnations, will have gone to waste. And the logic is the same for unforeseeable death at any age: the brute mathematical fact is that all things being equal, there is a better chance of being a young person than being an old person. So genes that strengthen young organisms at the expense of old organisms have the odds in their favor an...

There must be something in an animal’s lifestyle that makes a symmetrical design worth its price. The crucial lifestyle feature is mobility: the species with bilaterally symmetrical body plans are the ones that are designed to move in straight lines. The reasons are obvious. A creature with an asymmetrical body would veer off in circles, and a creature with asymmetrical sense organs would eccentrically monitor one side of its body even though equally interesting things can happen on either side. Though locomoting organisms are symmetrical side-to-side, they are not (apart from Dr. Dolittle’s Push-mi-pull-you) symmetrical front-and-back. Thrusters apply force best in one direction, so it is easier to build a vehicle that can move in one direction and turn than a vehicle that can move equally well in forward and reverse (or that can scoot off in any direction at all, like a flying saucer). Organisms are not symmetrical up-and-down because gravity makes up different from down.

Thus I predict that there are idiosyncratic combinations of genes (detectable in identical twins reared apart) behind the raconteur, the punster, the accidental poet, the sweet-talker, the rapier-like wit, the sesquipedalian, the word-juggler, the owner of the gift of gab, the Reverend Spooner, the Mrs. Malaprop, the Alexander Haig, the woman (and her teenage son!) I once tested who can talk backwards, and the student at the back of every linguistics classroom who objects that Who do you believe the claim that John saw? doesn’t sound so bad.

Whenever any of us gets grumpy about some change in usage, we would do well to read the words of Samuel Johnson in the preface to his 1755 dictionary, a reaction to the Jeremiahs of his day: Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I have flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectations which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and to repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwillin...

learning a grammar from examples requires a special similarity space (defined by Universal Grammar). So does learning the meanings of words from examples, as we saw in Quine’s gavagai problem, in which a word-learner has no logical basis for knowing whether gavagai means “rabbit,” “hopping rabbit,” or “undetached rabbit parts.” What does this say about learning everything else? Here is how Quine reports, and defuses, what he calls the “scandal of induction”: It makes one wonder the more about other inductions, where what is sought is a generalization not about our neighbor’s verbal behavior but about the harsh impersonal world. It is reasonable that our [mental] quality space should match our neighbor’s, we being birds of a feather; and so the general trustworthiness of induction in the…learning of words was a put-up job. To trust induction as a way of access to the truths of nature, on the other hand, is to suppose, more nearly, that our quality space matches that of the cosmos…. [But] why does our innate subjective spacing of qualities accord so well with the functionally relevant groupings in nature as to make our inductions tend to come out right? Why should our subjective spacing of qualities have a special purchase on nature and a lien on the future? There is some encouragement in Darwin. If people’s innate spacing of qualities is a gene-linked trait, then the spacing that has made for the most successful inductions will have tended to predominate through natural sel...

Eighty-five percent of human genetic variation consists of the differences between one person and another within the same ethnic group, tribe, or nation. Another eight percent is between ethnic groups, and a mere seven percent is between “races.”