The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

(Book Review)

Like “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Mother Tongue," this is another book I read to help me get ready for my applied linguistics course.
Since I have no idea what I’m getting into with this course, I’m not sure whether or not any of these books will be useful. But this one was definitely very informative about linguistics in general.

The book is written to make the last 60 or so years of linguistic research available to the more general public, and is written in an appropriately engaging style designed to appeal to a wide audience. Steven Pinker is a talented writer, and infuses his prose liberally with jokes, dry wit, and references to pop culture.

For example, in his chapter on mentalese (examining whether thoughts are based on words, or if thoughts are simply translated into words), Pinker begins the discussion with a lengthy quotation from George Orwell’s “1984,” which includes the following:
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words….”
The quotation goes on for a bit, but afterwards Pinker examines whether this would really be true.
As someone who has read “1984” numerous times (or rather, via audiobook listened to it numerous times) I’ve always been intrigued by that question, and was grateful to see Pinker take it on.

And much of the book is like that. The chapter on real life human speech patterns is illustrated by a lengthy quotation from the Nixon Watergate tapes. The difference between German grammar and English grammar is demonstrated by quoting Mark Twain. Woody Allen and Saturday Night Live references abound. The whole book is full of little treats to make the subject matter more interesting.

That being said, parts of this book were a challenge for me. Especially the more technical parts, where Pinker describes what happens when our brains decode the meaning of a grammatical sentence.
I could get through it, but I needed to sit in a quiet room with no distractions, and often had to read the same paragraph several times over before the meaning sunk it.
(As someone who reads almost exclusively trashy novels and arm-chair histories, I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to any sort of technical reading. Other people might have an easier time of it than I did.)

However, once I did put in the hard work to understand the book, I usually found what Pinker had to say to be quite fascinating. I always taken language for granted like I do breathing, and never really thought about what goes on in my brain when I hear a sentence. Or why my brain can easily understand a sentence like:
“Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing of the hummingbird,”
But struggles with a sentence like:
“The dog the stick the fire burned beat bit the cat.”

The book is heavily based off of Chomsky’s theories of universal grammar.
Since I, like most people, know about Chomsky exclusively through his - political - work, it is easy to forget that he leads another life as the world’s most prominent linguist. But I didn’t realize the full impact of his work until I read Pinker’s book. The way Pinker describes it, Chomsky created the model that all subsequent linguistic work has been based off of.

And this book serves as a very good introduction to Chomsky’s theories on universal grammar.
I have, once or twice in my youth, picked up introductory books on Chomsky’s grammar theories, just out of curiosity. This was the only book I could remotely understand. Even though parts of it required some concentration, it’s much more readable than anything else I’ve come across.

A couple other quick notes:
*Because this book was published in 1994, I imagine much of the information in it might be a bit dated, especially because Pinker is constantly saying things like, “Scientific research is just on the verge of figuring out this problem.”

* As a complete novice to the subject area, I more or less accepted everything Pinker had to say as concrete facts. I’ve since read a couple of reviews on-line, which have criticized him for emphasizing this or that theory, and dismissing others.

Link of the Day
Hopes And Prospects (Amnesty International Lecture)

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: Book Review (Scripted)