The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

No mute tribe has ever been discovered, and there is no record that a region has served as a “cradle” of language from which it spread to previously languageless groups.

So the universality of language does not lead to an innate language instinct as night follows day.

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 children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.

if the grammar of a creole is largely the product of the minds of children, unadulterated by complex language input from their parents, it should provide a particularly clear window on the innate grammatical machinery of the brain.

because the deaf are virtually the only neurologically normal people who make it to adulthood without having acquired a language, their difficulties offer particularly good evidence that successful language acquisition must take place during a critical window of opportunity in childhood.

Chomsky noted, comes from the basic design of language. Though sentences are strings of words, our mental algorithms for grammar do not pick out words by their linear positions, such as “first word,” “second word,” and so on. Rather, the algorithms group words into phrases, and phrases into even bigger phrases, and give each one a mental label, like “subject noun phrase” or “verb phrase.”

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.

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. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a single head, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because the internal representations are the imagination.

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa.

Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.

language “makes infinite use of finite media.”

The way language works, then, is that each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar).

The second consequence of the design of grammar is that it is a code that is autonomous from cognition.

When people learn a language, they are learning how to put words in order, but not by recording which word follows which other word. They do it by recording which word category—noun, verb, and so on—follows which other category.

A sentence is not a chain but a tree. In a human grammar, words are grouped into phrases, like twigs joined in a branch. The phrase is given a name—a mental symbol—and little phrases can be joined into bigger ones.

The invisible superstructure holding the words in place is a powerful invention that eliminates the problems of word-chain devices.

Phrase structure, then, is one solution to the engineering problem of taking an interconnected web of thoughts in the mind and encoding them as a string of words that must be uttered, one at a time, by the mouth.

Chomsky’s writing are “classics” in Mark Twain’s sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

One of the most intriguing discoveries of modern linguistics is that there appears to be a common anatomy in all phrases in all the world’s languages.

What the entire phrase is “about” is what its head word is about.

The head and its role-players—other than the subject role, which is special—are joined together in a subphrase, smaller than an NP or a VP, that has the kind of non-mnemonic label that has made generative linguistics so uninviting, “N-bar” and “V-bar,”

it is a hypothesis about how the rules of language are set up in our brains, governing the way we talk. It dictates that if a phrase contains both a role-player and a modifier, the role-player has to be closer to the head than the modifier is—there’s no way the modifier could get between the head noun and the role-player without crossing branches in the tree (that is, sticking extraneous words in among the bits of the N-bar), which is illegal.

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. The orderings inside a noun phrase and inside a verb phrase are the same: the noun comes before its role-players (the destruction of the hotel room, not the of the hotel room destruction), and the verb comes before its role-players (to destroy the hotel room, not to the hotel room destroy). The modifiers go to the right in both cases, the subject to the left. It seems as if there is a standard design to the two phrases.

This streamlined version of phrase structure is called “the X-bar theory.” This general blueprint for phrases extends even farther, to other languages. 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.

Chomsky suggests that the unordered super-rules (principles) are universal and innate, and that when children learn a particular language, they do not have to learn a long list of rules, because they were born knowing the super-rules. All they have to learn is whether their particular language has the parameter value head-first, as in English, or head-last, as in Japanese. They can do that merely by noticing whether a verb comes before or after its object in any sentence in their parents’ speech.

The auxiliary is the head of the sentence in exactly the same way that a noun is the head of the noun phrase. Since the auxiliary is also called INFL (for “inflection”), we can call the sentence an IP (an INFL phrase or auxiliary phrase).

An auxiliary is an example of a “function word,” a different kind of word from nouns, verbs, and adjectives, the “content” words.

Function words are bits of crystallized grammar; they delineate larger phrases into which NP’s and VP’s and AP’s fit, thereby providing a scaffolding for the sentence.

Function words also capture much of what makes one language grammatically different from another. Though all languages have function words, the properties of the words differ in ways that can have large effects on the structure of the sentences in the language.

every sentence has two phrase structures. The phrase structure we have been talking about so far, the one defined by the super-rules, is the deep structure. Deep structure is the interface between the mental dictionary and phrase structure. In the deep structure, all the role-players for put appear in their expected places. Then a transformational operation can “move” a phrase to a previously unfilled slot elsewhere in the tree. That is where we find the phrase in the actual sentence. This new tree is the surface 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.

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.

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.

The engineering trick behind human language—its being a discrete combinatorial system—is used in at least two different places: sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax, and the words themselves are built out of smaller bits by another set of rules, the rules of “morphology.”

Words have a delicate anatomy consisting of pieces, called morphemes, that fit together in certain ways.

There is a simple way to tell whether something is a compound word or a phrase: compounds generally have stress on the first word, phrases on the second. A dark róom (phrase) is any room that is dark, but a dárk room (compound word) is where photographers work,

The head of an English word is simply its rightmost morpheme.

The smallest part of a word, the part that cannot be cut up into any smaller parts, is called its root. Roots can combine with special suffixes to form stems.

Irregular plurals, because they are quirky, have to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated by a rule. Because of this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem to another existing stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental dictionary; they are complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are needed. They are put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to the compounding rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary.

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.

The brain seems to be reserving an especially capacious storage space and an especially rapid transcribing mechanism for the mental dictionary.

experimental studies of baby cognition have shown that infants have the concept of an object before they learn any words for objects, just as we would expect.

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.

So what’s in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of separate words,

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words

speech is by far the fastest way of getting information into the head through the ear. No human-made system can match a human in decoding speech.

Unlike words and morphemes, though, phonemes do not contribute bits of meaning to the whole.