The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

Delays Dog Deaf-Mute Murder Trial British Banks Soldier On I thought that the Vietnam war would end for at least an appreciable chunk of time this kind of reflex anticommunist hysteria. The musicians are master mimics of the formulas they dress up with irony. The movie is Tom Wolfe’s dreary vision of a past that never was set against a comic view of the modern hype-bound world. That Johnny Most didn’t need to apologize to Chick Kearn, Bill King, or anyone else when it came to describing the action [Johnny Most when he was in his prime]. Family Leave Law a Landmark Not Only for Newborn’s Parents Condom Improving Sensation to be Sold

But as we have seen, the metaphor is misleading. The complete process of understanding is better characterized by the joke about the two psychoanalysts who meet on the street. One says, “Good morning”; the other thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

Beyond a time depth of about a thousand years, history and typology often do not correlate well at all. Languages can change from grammatical type to type relatively quickly, and can cycle among a few types over and over; aside from vocabulary, they do not progressively differentiate and diverge. For example, English has changed from a free-word-order, highly inflected, topic-prominent language, as its sister German remains to this day, to a fixed-word-order, poorly inflected, subject-prominent

Like SOV languages, not too long ago English availed itself of an SOV order, which is still interpretable in archaic expressions like Till death do us part and With this ring I thee wed.

To understand why there is more than one language, then, we must understand the effects of innovation, learning, and migration.

Germanic languages like Old English had an “umlaut” rule that changed a back vowel to a front vowel if the next syllable contained a high front vowel sound. For example, in foti, the plural of “foot,” the back o was altered by the rule to a front e, harmonizing with the front i. Subsequently the i at the end ceased being pronounced, and because the phonological rule no longer had anything to trigger it, speakers reinterpreted the o–e shift as a morphological relationship signaling the plural—resulting in our foot–feet, mouse–mice, goose–geese, tooth–teeth, and louse–lice.

How far back can we trace the language of this book, modern American English? Surprisingly far, perhaps five or even nine thousand years.

Thus it is true that these dialects preserve some English forms that are rare elsewhere, such as afeared, yourn, hisn, and et, holp, and clome as the past of eat, help, and climb. But so does every variety of American English, including the standard one. Many so-called Americanisms were in fact carried over from England, where they were subsequently lost. For example, the participle gotten, the pronunciation of a in path and bath with a front-of-the-mouth “a” rather than the back-of-the-mouth “ah,” and the use of mad to mean “angry,” fall to mean “autumn,” and sick to mean “ill,” strike the British ear as all-American, but they are actually holdovers from the English that was spoken in the British Isles at the time of the American colonization.

obsolete.) Before the vowel shift, mouse had been pronounced “mooce”; the old “oo” turned into a diphthong. The gap left by the departed “oo” was filled by raising what used to be an “oh” sound; what we pronounce as goose had, before the Great Vowel Shift, been pronounced “goce.” That vacuum, in turn, was filled by the “o” vowel (as in hot, only drawn out), giving us broken from what had previously been pronounced more like “brocken.” In a similar rotation, the “ee” vowel turned into a diphthong; like had been pronounced “leek.”

One interesting parallel is that what most people think of as the Mongoloid or Oriental race on the basis of superficial facial features and skin coloring may have no biological reality. In Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic family tree, northeast Asians such as Siberians, Japanese, and Koreans are more similar to Europeans than to southeast Asians such as Chinese and Thai. Strikingly, this non-obvious racial grouping corresponds to the non-obvious linguistic grouping of Japanese, Korean, and Altaic with Indo-European in Nostratic, separate from the Sino-Tibetan family in which Chinese

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.

These are examples of the causative rule, found in English and many other languages, which takes an intransitive verb meaning “to do something” and converts it to a transitive verb meaning “to cause to do something”: The butter melted. Sally melted the butter. The ball bounced. Hiram bounced the ball. The horse raced past the barn. The jockey raced the horse past the barn. The causative rule can apply to some verbs but not others; occasionally children apply it too zealously. But it is not easy, even for a linguist, to say why a ball can bounce or be bounced, and a horse can race or be raced, but a brother can only die, not be died,

The psycholinguist Martin Braine once tried for several weeks to stamp out one of his daughter’s grammatical errors. Here is the result: Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy. Father: You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON. Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy. Father: Can you say “the other spoon”? Child: Other…one…spoon. Father: Say…“other.” Child: Other. Father: “Spoon.” Child: Spoon. Father: “Other…Spoon.” Child: Other…spoon. Now give me other one spoon? Braine wrote, “Further tuition is ruled out by her protest, vigorously supported by my wife.”

There is some evidence that left-handers, though better at mathematical, spatial, and artistic activities, are more susceptible to language impairment, dyslexia, and stuttering. Even righties with left-handed relatives (presumably, those righties possessing only one copy of the dominant right-bias gene) appear to parse sentences in subtly different ways than pure righties.

face). Perhaps the sneezing-in-elevators gene complex is the one that specifies just the right combination of thresholds and cross-connections among the modules governing humor, reactions to enclosed spaces, sensitivity to the mental states of others such as their anxiety and boredom, and the sneezing reflux.

Elephants are the only living animals that possess this extraordinary organ. Their closest living terrestrial relative is the hyrax, a mammal that you would probably not be able to tell from a large guinea pig. Until now you have probably not given the uniqueness of the elephant’s trunk a moment’s thought. Certainly no biologist has made a fuss about it. But now imagine what might happen if some biologists were elephants. Obsessed with the unique place of the trunk in nature, they might ask how it could have evolved, given that no other organism has a trunk or anything like it. One school might

armchair. The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counterexample in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself) and then gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists.

In the tree of life, traits like eyes or hands or infinite vocalizations can arise on any branch, or several times on different branches, some leading to humans, some not. There is an important scientific issue at stake, but it is not whether some species possesses the true version of a trait as opposed to some pale imitation or vile impostor. The issue is which traits are homologous to which other ones.

“Homologous” traits, in contrast, may or may not have a common function, but they descended from a common ancestor and hence have some common structure that bespeaks their being “the same” organ. The wing of a bat, the front leg of a horse, the flipper of a seal, the claw of a mole, and the hand of a human have very different functions, but they are all modifications of the forelimb of the ancestor of all mammals,

product. And a 1% difference is not even so small. In terms of the information content in the DNA it is 10 megabytes, big enough for the Universal Grammar with lots of room left over for the rest of the instructions on how to turn a chimp into a human. Indeed, a 1% difference in total DNA does not even mean that only 1% of human and chimpanzee genes are different. It could, in theory, mean that 100% of human and chimpanzee genes are different, each by 1%. DNA is a discrete combinatorial code, so a 1% difference in the DNA for a gene can be as significant as a 100% difference, just as changing one bit in every byte, or one letter in every word, can result in a new text that is 100% different, not 10% or 20% different.

Modern Homo sapiens, which is thought to have appeared about 200,000 years ago and to have spread out of Africa 100,000 years ago, had skulls like ours and much more elegant and complex tools, showing considerable regional variation. It is hard to believe that they lacked language, given that biologically they were us, and all biologically modern humans have language. This

Any selection on brain size itself would surely have favored the pinhead. Selection for more powerful computational abilities (language, perception, reasoning, and so on) must have given us a big brain as a by-product, not the other way around!

Why should language be considered such a big deal? It has allowed humans to spread out over the planet and wreak large changes, but is that any more extraordinary than coral that build islands, earthworms that shape the landscape by building soil, or the photosynthesizing bacteria that first released corrosive oxygen into the atmosphere, an ecological catastrophe of its time? Why should talking humans be considered any weirder than elephants, penguins, beavers, camels, rattlesnakes, hummingbirds, electric eels, leaf-mimicking insects, giant sequoias, Venus flytraps, echolocating bats, or deep-sea fish with lanterns growing out of their heads? Some of these creatures have traits unique to their species, others do not, depending only on the accidents of which of their relatives have become extinct.

facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English at all periods, including Shakespeare and most of the mavens themselves, have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the “ignorant errors” these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it. (I confess that this has deterred me from splitting some splitworthy infinitives.)

A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools of the trade for the language maven.

The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following: Mary saw everyone before John noticed them. Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

everyone and they are not an “antecedent” and a “pronoun” referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The

I am obliged to discuss one more example: the much-vilified hopefully. A sentence like Hopefully, the treaty will pass is said to be a grave error. The adverb hopefully comes from the adjective hopeful, meaning “in a manner of hope.” Therefore, the mavens say, it should be used only when the sentence refers to a person who is doing something in a hopeful manner. If it is the writer or reader who is hopeful, one should say It is hoped that the treaty will pass, or If hopes are realized, the treaty will pass, or I hope that the treaty will pass. Now consider the following: 1. It is simply not true that an English adverb must indicate the manner in which the actor performs the action. Adverbs come in two kinds: “verb phrase” adverbs like carefully, which do refer to the actor, and “sentence” adverbs like frankly, which indicate the attitude of the speaker toward the content of the sentence. Other examples of sentence adverbs include:

So just because Me and Jennifer is a subject that requires subject case, it does not mean that Me is a subject that requires subject case, and just because Al Gore and I is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that I is an object that requires object case. On grammatical grounds, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants. The

own, I would guess that most other human “cultural” practices (competitive sports, narrative literature, landscape design, ballet), no matter how much they seem like arbitrary outcomes of a Borgesian lottery, are clever technologies we have invented to exercise and stimulate mental modules that were originally designed for specific adaptive functions.

Something can be ordinarily inherited but show zero heritability, like number of legs at birth or the basic structure of the mind.

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.” In other words, the genetic difference between, say, two randomly picked Swedes is about twelves times as large as the genetic difference between the average of Swedes and the average of Apaches or Warlpiris. Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza suggests that the illusion is the result of an unfortunate coincidence.