The Language Instinct Quotes

“Likewise, though words for things being done, such as count and jump, are usually verbs, verbs can be other things, like mental states (know, like), possession (own, have), and abstract relations among ideas (falsify, prove). Conversely, a single concept, like “being interested,” can be expressed by different parts of speech: her interest in fungi [noun] Fungi are starting to interest her more and more. [verb] She seems interested in fungi. Fungi seem interesting to her. [adjective] Interestingly, the fungi grew an inch in an hour. [adverb]”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“But as in most matters about language, she did not get it quite right. It is true that most names for persons, places, and things are nouns, but it is not true that most nouns are names for persons, places, or things. There are nouns with all kinds of meanings: the destruction of the city [an action] the way to San Jose [a path] whiteness moves downward [a quality] three miles along the path [a measurement in space] It takes three hours to solve the problem. [a measurement in time] Tell me the answer. [“what the answer is,” a question] She is a fool. [a category or kind] a meeting [an event] the square root of minus two [an abstract concept] He finally kicked the bucket. [no meaning at all]”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“according to the transition probabilities of English. Remember Chomsky’s sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrived it not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical but also to show that improbable word sequences can be grammatical. In English texts the probability that the word colorless is followed by the word green is surely zero. So is the probability that green is followed by ideas, ideas by sleep, and sleep by furiously.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings;”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language “makes infinite use of finite media.” We know the difference between the forgettable Dog bites man and the newsworthy Man bites dog because of the order in which dog, man, and bites are combined. That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar; as I have mentioned, it should not be confused with the pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is “the arbitrariness of the sign,” the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means “dog” just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As Richard Lederer points out in Crazy English, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the “sane” alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“A third problem is called “co-reference.” Say you start talking about an individual by referring to him as the tall blond man with one black shoe. The second time you refer to him in the conversation you are likely to call him the man; the third time, just him. But the three expressions do not refer to three people or even to three ways of thinking about a single person; the second and third are just ways of saving breath. Something in the brain must treat them as the same thing; English isn’t doing it.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“color is surely the most eye-catching. He noted that we see objects in different hues, depending on the wavelengths of the light they reflect, but that physicists tell us that wavelength is a continuous dimension with nothing delineating red, yellow, green, blue, and so on. Languages differ in their inventory of color words: Latin lacks generic “gray” and “brown”; Navajo collapses blue and green into one word; Russian has distinct words for dark blue and sky blue; Shona speakers use one word for the yellower greens and the greener yellows, and a different one for the bluer greens and the nonpurplish blues”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Among Whorf’s “kaleidoscopic flux of impressions,”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Broca’s area is adjacent to the part of the motor-control strip dedicated to the jaws, lip, and tongue, and it was once thought that Broca’s area is involved in the production of language (though obviously not speech per se, because writing and signing are just as affected). But the area seems to be implicated in grammatical processing in general. A defect in grammar will be most obvious in the output, because any slip will lead to a sentence that is conspicuously defective. Comprehension, on the other hand, can often exploit the redundancy in speech to come up with sensible interpretations with little in the way of actual parsing. For example, one can understand The dog bit the man or The apple that the boy is eating is red just by knowing that dogs bite men, boys eat apples, and apples are red. Even The car pushes the truck can be guessed at because the cause is mentioned before the effect. For a century, Broca’s aphasics fooled neurologists by using shortcuts. Their trickery was finally unmasked when psycholinguists asked them to act out sentences that could be understood only by their syntax, like The car is pushed by the truck or The girl whom the boy is pushing is tall. The patients gave the correct interpretation half the time and its opposite half the time—a mental coin flip.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back. No one knows why they are aligned in this order, but it seems to be a kind of syllogism from two other oddities. The first is that words that connote me-here-now tend to have higher and fronter vowels than verbs that connote distance from “me”: me versus you, here versus there, this versus that. The second is that words that connote me-here-now tend to come before words that connote literal or metaphorical distance from “me” (or a prototypical generic speaker):”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Because verbs have the power to dictate how a sentence conveys who did what to whom, one cannot sort out the roles in a sentence without looking up the verb. That is why your grammar teacher got it wrong when she told you that the subject of the sentence is the “doer of the action.” The subject of the sentence is often the doer, but only when the verb says so;”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“fundamental facts about language. First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar (not to be confused with pedagogical or stylistic “grammars,” which are just guides to the etiquette of written prose). The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other cultures’ psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“İnsanlar dil konusunda meraklı olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ulaşılabilir kısmıdır. İnsanlar dil hakkında bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doğasının iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceğini bilirler.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“dative,”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Daha önce de belirttiğim gibi dil, insan toplulukları arasında evrenseldir ve bildiğimiz kadarıyla türümüzün tarihi boyunca var olmuştur. Diller karşılıklı anlaşılmaz da olsalar, bu yüzeysel çeşitliliğin altında yüklemleri, tümce ve sözcük yapıları, ad durumları, yardımcı yüklemleri ve daha başka ögeleriyle evrensel dilbilgisinin tek bir bilgisayımsal tasarımı yatar.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Dış dünya âdeta el değmemiş bir orman ve az sonra neler olacağına dair başarılı öngörülerde bulunmaya tasarlanmış olan organizma, ardında aynı bu şekilde tasarlanmış daha çok bebek bırakacaktır. Mekân-zamanın nesneler ve eylemler olarak dilimlere bölünmesi, tahmin yürütmek için son derece hassas bir yöntemdir.
(...) Nesneleri sınıflar altında toplamak - yani zihincede sınıflar şeklinde etiketlemek - bir kişi bir varlık gördüğünde, kişinin doğrudan gözlemleyebileceği özelliklere kıyasla gözlemleyemeyeceği özellikler ile ilgili çıkarım yapmasına imkân sağlar.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“İnsanlar İngilizce veya Çince ya da Apaçi dilinde düşünmez; bir düşünce dilinde düşünür. (...) Bir dili olmayanın bile zihincesi vardır, büyük ihtimalle bebeklerin ve çok sayıda hayvanın da basit dilleri vardır. Eğer bebeklerin kendi dillerinden ya da dillerine çevirecekleri bir zihinceleri olmasaydı, bir dil öğrenme gerçekleşmez hatta bir dil öğrenme bir şey ifade etmezdi.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As for government euphemism, it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“In the second story of his column, Safire replies to a diplomat who received a government warning about "crimes against tourists (primarily robberies, muggings, and pick-pocketings)." The diplomat writes,

Note the State Department's choice of pick-pocketings. Is the doer of such deeds a pickpocket or a pocket-picker?

Safire replies, "The sentence should read 'robberies, muggings and pocket-pickings.' One picks pockets; no one pockets picks."
Significantly, Safire did not answer the question. If the perpetrator were called a pocket-picker, which is the most common kind of compound in English, then indeed the crime would be pocket-picking. But the name for the perpetrator is not really up for grabs; we all agree that he is called a pickpocket. And if he is called a pickpocket, not a pocket-picker, then what he does can perfectly well be called pick-pocketing, not pocket-picking, thanks to the ever-present English noun-to-verb conversion process, just as a cook cooks, a chair chairs, and a host hosts. The fact that no one pockets picks is a red herring - who said anything about a pick-pocketer?”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The myth that nonstandard dialects of English are grammatically deficient is widespread”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language