The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

All claims about a language instinct and other mental modules are claims about the commonalities among all normal people. They have virtually nothing to do with possible genetic differences between people.

dative. A family of constructions typically used for giving or benefiting; She BAKED ME A CAKE; She BAKED A CAKE FOR ME; He GAVE HER A PARTRIDGE; He GAVE A PARTRIDGE TO HER. Also refers to the case of the beneficiary or recipient in this construction.

deep structure (now d-structure). The tree, formed by phrase structure rules, into which words are plugged, in such a way as to satisfy the demands of the words regarding their neighboring phrases. Contrary to popular belief, not the same as Universal Grammar, the meaning of a sentence, or the abstract grammatical relationships underlying a sentence.

gerund. The noun formed out of a verb by adding -ing: his incessant HUMMING.

induction. Uncertain or probabilistic inference (as opposed to deduction), especially a generalization from instances: “This raven is black; that raven is black; therefore all ravens are black.”

inflecting language. A language, like Latin, Russian, Warlpiri, or ASL, that relies heavily on inflectional morphology to convey information, as opposed to an isolating language like Chinese that leaves the forms of words alone and orders the words within phrases and sentences to convey information. English does both, but is considered more isolating than inflecting.

intonation. The melody or pitch contour of speech.

intransitive. A verb that may appear without an object: We DINED; She THOUGHT that he was single; as opposed to a transitive verb, that may appear with one: He DEVOURED the steak; I TOLD him to go. inversion. Flipping the position of the subject

listeme. An uncommon but useful term corresponding to one of the senses of “word,” it refers to an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms, and idioms are listemes.

movement. The principal kind of transformational rule in Chomsky’s theory, it moves a phrase from its customary position in deep structure to some other, unfilled position, leaving behind a “trace”: Do you want what What do you want (trace).

prosody. The overall sound contour with which a word or sentence is pronounced: its melody (intonation) and rhythm (stress and timing).

recursion. A procedure that invokes an instance of itself, and thus can be applied repeatedly to create or analyze entities of any size: “How to put words in alphabetical order: sort the words so their first letters are in the same order as in the alphabet; then for each group of words beginning with the same letter, ignore that first letter and put the remaining parts in alphabetical order.” “A verb phrase can consist of a verb followed by a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase.”

surface structure (now s-structure). The phrase structure tree formed when movement transformations are applied to a deep structure. Thanks to traces, it contains all the information necessary to determine the meaning of the sentence. Aside from certain minor adjustments (executed by “stylistic” and phonological rules), it corresponds to the actual order of words that a person utters.

trace. A silent or “understood” element in a sentence, corresponding to the deep-structure position of a moved phrase: What did he put (TRACE) in the garage? (the trace corresponds to what); Boggs was grazed (TRACE) by a fastball (the trace corresponds to Boggs).

bar. The smallest kind of phrase, consisting of a head and its non-subject arguments (role-players): The Romans’ DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY; She WENT TO SCHOOL on foot; He is very PROUD OF HIS SON.

X-bar theory; X-bar phrase structure. The particular kind of phrase structure rules thought to be used in human languages, according to which all the phrases in all languages conform to a single plan. In that plan, the properties of the whole phrase are determined by the properties of a single element, the head, inside the phrase.

the most important influence parents have on their children is at the moment of conception. Children acquire their culture, and develop their personalities, in their interactions with their peer groups and society. Many features of language acquisition bear this out: the dispensability of parental speech in language acquisition, the phenomenon of creolization, the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and the fact that children of immigrants always grow up with the accents of their peers, not those of their parents.

Though no single gene specific to grammar has been identified (and perhaps none ever will), it is increasingly clear that sets of genes will be tied, with varying degrees of specificity and overlap with other functions, to aspects of language ability.

the problem with the idea that language affects thought is not that it’s entirely wrong but that there are many ways in which language can affect thought, and people tend to blur them together. In particular, people tend to confuse banal observations, such as that one person’s words can affect another person’s thoughts (if that weren’t true, language as a whole would be useless) with radical claims, such as that we think in our native language, and that the language we speak makes it impossible to think certain thoughts.

Neuroimaging studies suggest that a second language acquired in childhood is processed in the brain in a different way than a second language acquired in adulthood: in the former case, the two languages completely overlap; in the latter, they stake out distinct adjacent regions.

She found that congenitally deaf people who learned American Sign Language as a first language in adulthood did far worse than people who lost their hearing from an accident or disease and learned it as a second language in adulthood. (Congenitally deaf adults who learned ASL as children were, as one would expect, best of all.) This confirms that adults are much worse than children at acquiring a language, but that the difference is masked by the fact that most adults are learning a second language, not a first one.

They suggest that word understanding begins in the general vicinity of Wernicke’s area and then splits into two streams. One heads down and forward in the temporal lobe (the elongated lobe at the bottom of the picture) and connects to meaning; the other extends up and then forward to the frontal lobes and connects to articulation.