The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

It is safe to say that the grammatical machinery we used for English in Chapters 4–6 is used in all the world’s languages. All languages have a vocabulary in the thousands or tens of thousands, sorted into part-of-speech categories including noun and verb. Words are organized into phrases according to the X-bar system (nouns are found inside N-bars, which are found inside noun phrases, and so on). The higher levels of phrase structure include auxiliaries (INFL), which signify tense, modality, aspect, and negation. Nouns are marked for case and assigned semantic roles by the mental dictionary entry of the verb or other predicate. Phrases can be moved from their deep-structure positions, leaving a gap or “trace,” by a structure-dependent movement rule, thereby forming questions, relative clauses, passives, and other widespread constructions. New word structures can be created and modified by derivational and inflectional rules. Inflectional rules primarily mark nouns for case and number, and mark verbs for tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation, and agreement with subjects and objects in number, gender, and person. The phonological forms of words are defined by metrical and syllable trees and separate tiers of features like voicing, tone, and manner and place of articulation, and are subsequently adjusted by ordered phonological rules. Though many of these arrangements are in some sense useful, their details, found in language after language but not in any artificial system li...