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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Langua by Steven Pinker Harper Perennial Modern Classics, September 2007
Few people would deny the claim that language is one of the most distinctive traits that we have as a species, and some may argue that it is in fact the single most important difference between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. It is therefore unsurprising that the nature of language has always been a controversial subject, one to which many different branches of human knowledge have claimed as their own. Anthropologist have traditionally claimed that language is a cultural invention, one that is transmitted across generations very much in the same way as religious ideas, artistic expression, basic patterns of social interactions and a long list of etceteras. Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist from MIT, places himself at the opposite end of the spectrum with the very appropriately titled “The Language Instinct”: his main thesis is that we humans (and only humans) are born with the ability to communicate using language, because our brains come already customized to do so. As the author himself puts it in the book, for us using language is something as natural as building a nest is for a bird or spinning a web is for a spider.
This “nativist” approach is clearly derived from the groundbreaking work of Noam Chomsky, whose theories had the effect of a genuine revolution in the field of linguistics, and this is fully acknowledged by Pinker. Chomsky’s academic body of work, however, is notoriously obscure and hard to follow for non-linguist, and therefore Pinker’s book fills a vacant space by providing a very accessible summary to his main claims, the way they were received and the main objections that have been raised against them since they were first formulated. It was Chomsky who first formulated the idea of a “universal grammar” that is common to all languages ever spoken on Earth and underlies their basic structure. Pinker tries to accommodate this idea to what we know about neural function nowadays by postulating that certain structures in the human brain are specialized for this function and therefore constitute the physical basis for this universal grammar.
The book covers a lot of ground in order to find justification for this claim, ranging from a basic but very useful discussion of grammar structures, experimental approaches to language development in toddlers and a (very) critical evaluation of the current evidence on language acquisition by non-human species. The so-called Standard Social Science Model of Language is constantly represented as arbitrary, basically adopted due to the prevalent ideologies of academic circles rather than scientifically-based evidence, and Pinker strives to provide as many pieces of the latter as he can manage to muster to make his point. Even though this is in principle highly desirable, several of the examples he chooses to highlight are more ambiguous than what the author seems ready to acknowledge, and can in principle be accommodated by an alternative theoretical framework by anyone who is not as invested on a one-sided view of things as Pinker is.
The book is nevertheless a highly entertaining first approach to a fascinating subject, one that offers the opportunity to many academic areas that are normally separated to interact with each other and create a coherent explanation for a phenomenon that has obviously been crucial to our success as a species. Even if the view of the human mind as composed of separate modules specialized on specific activities that Pinker sponsors turns out to fall out of fashion, the very idea of introducing the experimental method to the study of language development, structure and evolution deserves to be promoted, and this book is undoubtedly heading towards that direction.
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