The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

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.

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston’s WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.

“I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” Here are some similar ambiguities that accidentally appeared in newspapers: Yoko Ono will talk about her husband John Lennon who was killed in an interview with Barbara Walkers. Two cars were reported stolen by the Groveton police yesterday. The license fee for altered dogs with

You must have noticed that noun phrases and verb phrases have a lot in common: (1) a head, which gives the phrase its name and determines what it is about, (2) some role-players, which are grouped with the head inside a subphrase (the N-bar or V-bar), (3) modifiers, which appear outside the N- or V-bar, and (4) a subject.

With this common design, there is no need to write out a long list of rules to capture what is inside a speaker’s head. There may be just one pair of super-rules for the entire language, where the distinctions among nouns, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives are collapsed and all four are specified with a variable like “X.”

In English, the head of a phrase comes before its role-players. In many languages, it is the other way around—but it is the other way around across the board, across all the kinds of phrases in the language. For example, in Japanese, the verb comes after its object, not before: they say Kenji sushi ate, not Kenji ate sushi. The preposition comes after its noun phrase: Kenji to, not to Kenji (so they are actually called “postpositions”). The adjective comes after its complement: Kenji than taller, not taller than Kenji. Even the words marking questions are flipped: they say, roughly, Kenji eat did?, not Did Kenji eat? Japanese and English are looking-glass versions of each other.

The trees become mobiles. One of the rules would say: {ZP*, X} “An X-bar is composed of a head X and any number of role-players, in either order.”

To get English, one appends a single bit of information saying that the order within an X-bar is “head-first.” To get Japanese, that bit of information would say that the order is “head-last.” Similarly, the other super-rule (the one for phrases) can be distilled so that left-to-right order boils away, and an ordered phrase in a particular language can be reconstituted by adding back either “X-bar-first” or “X-bar-last.” The piece of information that makes one language different from another is called a parameter. In fact, the super-rule is beginning to look less like an exact blueprint for a particular phrase and more like a general guideline or principle for what phrases must look like. The principle is usable only after you combine it with a language’s particular setting for the order parameter. This general conception of grammar, first proposed by Chomsky, is called the “principles and parameters” theory.

“Bang!” The comedian Dick Gregory tells of walking up to a lunch counter in Mississippi during the days of racial segregation. The waitress said to him, “We don’t serve colored people.” “That’s fine,” he replied, “I don’t eat colored people. I’d like a piece of chicken.”

case markers are exploited even further: the article, adjective, and noun inside a phrase are each tagged with a particular case marker, and the speaker can scramble the words of the phrase all over the sentence (say, put the adjective at the end for emphasis), knowing that the listener can mentally join them back up. This process, called agreement or concord, is a second engineering solution (aside from phrase structure itself) to the problem of encoding a tangle of interconnected thoughts into strings of words that appear one after the other.

Curiously, while verbs and prepositions can mark case on their adjacent NP’s, nouns and adjectives cannot: governor California and afraid the wolf, though interpretable, are ungrammatical. English demands that the meaningless preposition of precede the noun, as in governor of California and afraid of the wolf, for no reason other than to give it a case tag.

Since the auxiliary is also called INFL (for “inflection”), we can call the sentence an IP (an INFL phrase or auxiliary phrase).

New Housing for Elderly Not Yet Dead New Missouri U. Chancellor Expects Little Sex 12 on Their Way to Cruise Among Dead in Plane Crash N.J. Judge to Rule on Nude Beach Chou Remains Cremated Chinese Apeman Dated Hershey Bars Protest Reagan Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead Deer Kill 130,000 Complaints About NBA Referees Growing Ugly

We have already seen one example: overt case and agreement markers in Latin allow noun phrases to be scrambled; silent ones in English force them to remain in place.

Deep structure is the interface between the mental dictionary and phrase structure.

Why do languages bother with separate deep structures and surface structures? Because it takes more than just keeping the verb happy—what deep structure does—to have a usable sentence. A given concept often has to play one kind of role, defined by the verb in the verb phrase, and simultaneously a separate role, independent of the verb, defined by some other layer of the tree. Consider the difference between Beavers build dams and its passive, Dams are built by beavers. Down in the verb phrase—the level of who did what to whom—the nouns are playing the same roles in both sentences. Beavers do the building, dams get built. But up at the sentence (IP) level—the level of subject-predicate relations, of what is being asserted to be true of what—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, like the Grand Coulee Dam, are not built by beavers). The surface structure, which puts dams in the sentence’s subject position but links it to a trace of its original verb phrase position, allows the cake to be both eaten and had.

If a logician were to express the meaning behind the sentence, it would be something like “For which x, John put xin the garage.”

The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages. The English noun comes in exactly two forms (duck and ducks), the verb in four (quack, quacks, quacked, quacking). In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million!

A dark róom (phrase) is any room that is dark, but a dárk room (compound word) is where photographers work, and a darkroom can be lit when the photographer is done. A black bóard, (phrase) is necessarily a board that is black, but some bláckboards (compound word) are green or even white. Without pronunciation or punctuation as a guide, some word strings can be read either as a phrase or as a compound, like the following headlines:

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim Man Eating Piranha Mistakenly Sold as Pet Fish Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

Second, root-affix combinations have unpredictable meanings; the neat scheme for interpreting the meaning of the whole from the meaning of the parts breaks down. Complexity is the state of being complex, but electricity is not the state of being electric (you would never say that the electricity of this new can opener makes it convenient); it is the force powering something electric. Similarly, instrumental has nothing to do with instruments, intoxicate is not about toxic substances, one does not recite at a recital, and a five-speed transmission is not an act of transmitting.

Sally Salter, she was a young teacher who taught, And her friend, Charley Church, was a preacher who praught; Though his enemies called him a screecher, who scraught. His heart, when he saw her, kept sinking, and sunk; And his eye, meeting hers, began winking, and wunk;

While she in her turn, fell to thinking, and chunk. In secret he wanted to speak, and he spoke, To seek with his lips what his heart long had soke, So he managed to let the truth leak, and it loke. The kiss he was dying to steal, then he stole; At the feet where he wanted to kneel, then he knole; And he said, “I feel better than ever I fole.”

its being a verb based on a word that is not a verb. By the same logic, we say They ringed the city with artillery (“formed a ring around it”), not They rang the city with artillery,

Kiparsky: compounds can be formed out of irregular plurals but not out of regular plurals. For example, a house infested with mice can be described as mice-infested, but it sounds awkward to describe a house infested with rats as rats-infested. We say that it is rat-infested, even though by definition one rat does not make an infestation. Similarly, there has been much talk about men-bashing but no talk about gays-bashing (only gay-bashing), and there are teethmarks, but no clawsmarks.

Dictionaries are consumer products, not scientific instruments,

Indeed, naturalistic 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.

The good can decay many ways. The good candy came anyways. The stuffy nose can lead to problems. The stuff he knows can lead to problems. Some others I’ve seen. Some mothers I’ve seen.

Real speech, somehow, is perceived an order of magnitude faster: ten to fifteen phonemes per second for casual speech, twenty to thirty per second for the man in the late-night Veg-O-Matic ads, and as many as forty to fifty per second for artificially sped-up speech.

But in the fifteenth century English pronunciation underwent a convulsion called the Great Vowel Shift. The vowels that had simply been pronounced longer now became “tense”: by advancing the tongue root (the muscles attaching the tongue to the jaw), the tongue becomes tense and humped rather than lax and flat, and the hump narrows the air chamber in the mouth above it, changing the resonances. Also, some tense vowels in modern English, like in bite and brow, are “diphthongs,” two vowels pronounced in quick succession as if they were one: ba-eet, bra-oh.

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razzamatazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you’d never ask. Consonants differ in “obstruency”—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?

For example, Japanese is famous for not distinguishing r from l. When I arrived in Japan on November 4, 1992, the linguist Masaaki Yamanashi greeted me with a twinkle and said, “In Japan, we have been very interested in Clinton’s erection.”

The linguist Sarah G. Thomason has found that people who claim to be channeling back to past lives or speaking in tongues are really producing gibberish that conforms to a sound pattern vaguely reminiscent of the claimed language.

An argot popular among young ruffians contains forms like fan-fuckin-tastic, abso-bloody-lutely, Phila-fuckin-delphia, and Kalama-fuckin-zoo. Ordinarily,

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.”

tongue. Notice another important feature of the vowel-altering rule. The vowel i is altered in front of many different consonants, not just t. Compare: prize price five fife jibe hype geiger biker Does this mean there are five different rules that alter i—one for z versus s, one for v versus f, and so on? Surely not. The change-triggering consonants t, s, f, p, and k all differ in the same way from their counterparts d, z, v, b, and g: they are unvoiced, whereas the counterparts are voiced. We need only one rule, then: change i whenever it appears before an unvoiced consonant.

walked slapped passed jogged sobbed fizzed In walked, slapped, and passed, the -ed is pronounced as a t; in jogged, sobbed, and fizzed, it is pronounced as a d. By now you can probably figure out what is behind the difference: the t pronunciation comes after voiceless consonants like k, p, and s; the d comes after voiced ones like g, b, and z. There must be a rule that adjusts the pronunciation

In all known writing systems, the symbols designate only three kinds of linguistic structure: the morpheme, the syllable, and the phoneme. Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese logograms, and Japanese kanji encode morphemes. Cherokee, Ancient Cypriot, and Japanese kana are syllable-based. All modern phonemic alphabets appear to be descended from a system invented by the Canaanites around 1700 B.C.

Indeed, for about eighty-four percent of English words, spelling is completely predictable from regular rules.

A morphemic spelling can help a reader distinguishing homophones, like meet and mete. It can also tip off a reader that one word contains another (and not just a phonologically identical impostor). For example, spelling tells us that overcome contains come, so we know that its past tense must be overcame, whereas succumb just contains the sound “kum,” not the morpheme come, so its past tense is not succame but succumbed. Similarly, when something recedes, one has a recession, but when someone re-seeds a lawn, we have a re-seeding.

Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.

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.

Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing of the hummingbird Sentences can also branch to the left. Left-branching trees are most common in head-last languages like Japanese but are found in a few constructions in English, too. As before, the parser never has to keep more than one dangling branch in mind at a time: The hummingbird’s wing’s motion’s rapidity is remarkable

Ingres enjoyed painting his models nude. My son has grown another foot. Visiting relatives can be boring. Vegetarians don’t know how good meat tastes. I saw the man with the binoculars.

The sentence Time flies like an arrow is surely unambiguous if there ever was an unambiguous sentence (ignoring the difference between literal and metaphorical meanings, which have nothing to do with syntax). But to the surprise of the programmers, the sharp-eyed computer found it to have five different trees! Time proceeds as quickly as an arrow proceeds, (the intended reading) Measure the speed of flies in the same way that you measure the speed of an arrow. Measure the speed of flies in the same way that an arrow measures the speed of flies. Measure the speed of flies that resemble an arrow. Flies of a particular kind, time-flies, are fond of an arrow.

The judge sentenced the killer to die in the electric chair for the second time. Dr. Tackett Gives Talk on Moon No one was injured in the blast, which was attributed to the buildup of gas by one town official. The summary of information contains totals of the number of students broken down by sex, marital status, and age.

I once read a book jacket flap that said that the author lived with her husband, an architect and an amateur musician in Cheshire, Connecticut. For a moment I thought it was a ménage à quatre.

The horse raced past the barn fell. The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi. The prime number few. Fat people eat accumulates. The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR. Most people proceed contendedly through the sentence up to a certain point, then hit a wall and frantically look back to earlier words to try to figure out where they went wrong. Often the attempt fails and people assume that the sentences have an extra word tacked onto the end or consist of two pieces of sentence stitched together. In fact, each one is a grammatical sentence: The horse that was walked past the fence proceeded steadily, but the horse raced past the barn fell. The man who fishes goes into work seven days a week, but the man who hunts ducks out on weekends. The cotton that sheets are usually made of grows in Egypt, but the cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi. The mediocre are numerous, but the prime number few. Carbohydrates that people eat are quickly broken down, but fat people eat accumulates. JR Ewing had swindled one tycoon too many into buying useless properties. The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR.