The Language Instinct

"This is a popular science book from a highly respected cognitive scientist. He took one part of the mind, language, and looked at it from every angle. It’s a really wonderful example of what you can do: take research into something as fundamental to human nature as language and make it accessible to a wide audience. He looks at how infants develop language, whether other animals are capable of understanding language, how the brain produces and processes language, how language evolved, the role of experience versus genetic factors in language, how we use language in the media… He looks at it from every angle. It was, deservedly, a very popular and successful book. Language is at the core of many of the humanities, yet here was a writer addressing it as a scientist. His book is of interest both to those in the arts and the sciences, given the centrality of language to being human."

"It’s partly the fact it’s so beautifully written. It came out in 1994—I’d just become a teenager then, and was getting into all sorts of popular science, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Hawking. Steven Pinker was one of those writers, although it’s hard to know if it had an influence on me later. I’m not a linguist so it may be that some of the content isn’t as current as it was. The version I have now was published in 2007, and in it Pinker says things hadn’t changed too much. That’s consistent with what Buss said about Pinker’s theories still being current. But a bit of a warning there. “It wasn’t obvious that language evolved, because languages look so very different. But he goes through the underlying structure and it’s very similar” The types of arguments that you’ve got to make in evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker made them and made them brilliantly. You’ve got to break down people’s intuition that they already know how they do what they do—use language in his case—and they already know what it’s for, and how it works. People think, ‘I don’t need to be told why I talk. I already know: I talk to tell you stuff, I talk to get things I want…’ You’ve got to break that down first. People have these incorrect intuitions for a reason, which is of interest in itself. And Pinker is well aware of this. He’s got to argue something that we wouldn’t have to now: that the ability to communicate through language is something that was subject to evolution in the first place. It’s not just a consequence of having huge brains, that your brain gets to a certain size and you will spontaneously start speaking. He’s got to explain that there’s a module, something quite specific. So he goes through the localisation of the brain, how it develops in children. How specific gene mutations cause specific problems in language. All of which point to the idea that the mechanism for language evolved . Individual languages not so much; there are people who speak Spanish , Chinese, and English. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t obvious that language evolved, because they look so very different, but he goes through the underlying structure and it’s very similar. They all have grammars, the grammars achieve the same things. And this deals with a question that maybe we’ve moved on from: that learning and innateness aren’t opposites. You need some innate mechanism to do the learning. He’s very, very good at explaining these things. They’re the building blocks, the things you have to get over before you can do evolutionary psychology. You’ve got to remember that words are a way of changing what other people do. If I spoke, but no one else changed what they did as a result of me saying them, I would never have evolved language. And that makes another pressure: I learn to say things, but others have also got to evolve to respond to that, because if everybody just did what I told them to do all the time, then fantastic for me—but clearly not so good for their genes. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. Once you start on that race, things proceed very fast. So it’s a wonderful book, both for the way it’s written, for the details, and for offering a background to evolutionary psychology. I think that’s fair. Why am I hesitating? Some people have taken the computer analogy so far it’s become a bit unpopular. When you put it in computer terms, people accept all these other things that we can add on to that analogy. But I think at that surface level, yes, the hardware/software distinction makes sense."

"There are two achievements in this book. One is to smuggle in Linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. It’s a fun read, he’s a really engaging writer. If you finish this book, you’ll never see language in the same way again. I felt that way when I picked it up about ten years ago – it set me on the path that led me to write my own book. At the same time, he also smuggles in his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. He’s one of the camp that thinks there is this thing called ‘the language instinct’ that is hard-wired into the brain. Languages are fundamentally similar around the world, they show too many characteristics in common. There are too many logical ways to design a language that you could use, but no human natural language does. So his conclusion is that we have, through evolution, developed a language instinct. That is not something every linguist believes by any means. There’s a big disagreement over it. But then Pinker also gives you all this fantastic stuff about how language really works in the first place. Anybody who is really curmudgeonly, who says: ‘Uggh. Language. Everybody I know speaks and writes like an idiot around me!’ He really turns that on its head and shows what a miracle the human language really is. This book came out in 1994 so he’s taking aim at a different generation of sticklers, but yes, he also shows they don’t know what they’re talking about. Most grammar grouches have a fairly authoritarian approach to language. They have this idea that somewhere, somehow, there is somebody making rules, or that there are just hard and fast rules that have to be enforced, and people humiliated out of violating them. Pinker would argue that language is absolutely about rules. He wrote another book called Words and Rules which is all about how the brain processes language. It turns out that you know all these rules but you don’t even know that you know them. They are your internal language processing device. And to study that is much more fascinating than whether or not you should begin a sentence with ‘however’, which some people think you shouldn’t be able to do. For example, Pinker shows that if you put the word ‘fuckin’ in the middle of a word – for instance, if you want to say: ‘That’s fan-fuckin’-tastic!’ You have to put the word fuckin’ in a certain place in the word. It goes before a certain stressed syllable. You can’t say: ‘That’s fantast-fuckin-ic!’ – and no English speaker would ever say that. Everybody knows it. They have this rule in their brain, but nobody knows they have it. Teasing out that kind of thing is fascinating and so much more interesting than: ‘Oh my God! That person used ‘whom’ wrong…’ I wouldn’t say that. The argument of descriptive linguists is often a bit caricatured by opponents, who say: ‘Oh, you’re saying there are no rules at all, you can just say whatever you like.’ It’s not really true. I’m sure Pinker uses ‘disinterested’ like you do. In traditional standard English usage, it means impartial and it has that role. There haven’t been enough people who have changed the meaning of the word, that it definitely now means only ‘bored’ or ‘not interested’. The majority of English usage still favours disinterested in the traditional sense, even though a lot of people make that mistake. It takes a big majority of the community of speakers over time to get the whole meaning of a word to change so that you can finally really say: ‘OK, this word has changed in meaning.’ I wouldn’t say we’ve reached that in the specific case of disinterested. It used to mean innocent. Words used to mean completely different things, almost their opposite, if you look back in their history."