The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial, 1995. 

Summary: 

This book is at the border of cognitive science and linguistics. It argues that language is partly inherited and biological. 

Deep Structure: 

Noam Chomsky asserted that part of grammar is built into the brain at birth. Chomsky called it “deep structure”. Chomsky considered the earlier hypothesis that children infer grammatical rules from generalizing examples they hear, but rejected it. Chomsky made an argument against this hypothesis, which he called the argument from the poverty of input: children spontaneously utter sentences that obey many rules of grammar, without having previously heard other people uttering sentences that obey these rules. That is, some of the children’s grammatical rules cannot have been inferred by inductive reasoning from hearing examples of the rule, because they have previously heard no such examples. This theory became known to the general public in 1957, when Noam Chomsky published a book describing it called Syntactic Structures.

Evidence for Deep Structure: 

Pinker’s book is largely a defense of this theory, based on more recent research on how children acquire language:

• Experiments have shown that children follow the rule that compounds can be formed from irregular plurals but not from regular plurals: mice-infested but not rats-infested. Children follow this rule without having previously heard examples of it.

• Children innately parse sentences as trees, even though it would be simpler for them to parse sentences linearly.

• A pidgin is a combination of two languages without grammar. A creole comes later and has grammar. Children turn a pidgin into a creole by adding grammar. The grammar originates in the minds of the children. The children do not learn it from their parents, who are speaking only the grammar-less pidgin.

• There is a part of the brain devoted to language, distinct from that devoted to general cognition. This has been shown by anatomical studies, and by genetic studies, where some people have genetic defects that damage their language abilities only, and not their general thinking.

Deep Structure of Phrases: 

The deep structure represents the sentence as a tree of phrases. Each phrase is made up of these parts: 

• Head: what the phrase is mainly about; it may be a noun or verb

• One or more role players

• Modifiers of roles

The subject of a phrase is a kind of role, which is often the causal agent. Modifiers are also called adjuncts. This general structure has been found in all languages. 

Deep Structure of Sentences: 

A sentence is made up of noun phrases and verb phrases, plus some other words. Each noun phrase and verb phrase has its own head. Additionally, the sentence as a whole has a head. The word that is the head of a sentence is generally an auxiliary (helping) verb. Examples of auxiliary verbs: will, shall, may, might, can, could, must, ought to, should, would. The meaning of the auxiliary verb refers to the sentence as a whole. The auxiliary makes the sentence specific and concrete enough enough, so that it is meaningful to ask whether the sentence is true. It often gives the tense or mood. Pinker’s example: the word will is an auxiliary for the sentence the Red Sox will win the World Series. 

Transformation: 

The part of grammar that is learned is how to transform the deep structure into the surface structure. The surface structure is what we call grammar. During the transformation the order of words may be rearranged. 

Language Universals and Deep Structure: 

Linguist Joseph Greenberg found 45 language universals. Since his work, others have found many more. One of the most common universals is the implication: if a language has feature X, it will also have feature Y. An example of a universal implication is: when a language changes from Subject-Object-Verb word order to Subject-Verb-Object word order, its postpositions flip to prepositions. During the evolution of language such grammatical changes have happened many times and places distant from each other. Therefore, it is unlikely that history is the explanation for this rule. What is more likely that the mechanism is inherent in the brain. 

Morphological Rules: 

Besides discussing deep structure, Pinker also discusses a finer aspect of language, namely, how words are formed. In analogy with the syntactical rules that form sentences from words, morphological rules form words from morphemes. The smallest part of a word is called its root. The root plus, optionally, one or more affixes, forms the stem. Some affixes attach only to the root. Other affixes can attach to other affixes. Inflections attach to stems, not at the earlier stage of roots. The meaning of a stem cannot always be determined from its root and affixes. So the mind’s meaning dictionary must be at the level of stems and not at the level of roots. Is this mind-boggling, or what?!