The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

in quotidian speech that far outshines the local curiosities of etymologies, unusual words, and fine points of usage. For the reader of popular science, I hope to explain what is behind the recent discoveries (or, in many cases, nondiscoveries) reported in the press: universal deep structures, brainy babies, grammar genes, artificially intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral children, paradoxical brain damage, identical twins separated

Good

controversies remind me of the blind men palpating the elephant. If my personal synthesis seems to embrace both sides of debates like “formalism versus functionalism” or “syntax versus semantics versus pragmatics,” perhaps it is because there was never an issue there to begin with. For the general nonfiction reader, interested in language and human beings in the broadest sense, I hope to offer something different from the airy platitudes—Language Lite—that typify discussions of language (generally by people who have never studied it) in the humanities and sciences alike. For better or worse, I can write in only one way, with a passion for powerful, explanatory ideas, and a torrent of relevant detail.