The theory not only challenges convention wisdom about language itself (especially from the self-appointed 'experts' who claim to be safeguarding the language but who understand it less well than a typical teenager).

With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats. But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading scientists of language and the mind, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. Some are from everyday experience: Why do immigrants struggle with a new language, only to have their fluent children ridicule their grammatical errors? Why can't computers converse with us? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs, not the Maple Leaves? Some are from popular science: Have scientists really reconstructed the first language spoken on earth? Are there genes for grammar? Can chimpanzees learn sign language? And some are from our deepest ponderings about the human condition: Does our language control our thoughts? How could language have evolved? Is language deteriorating? Today laypeople can chitchat about black holes and dinosaur extinctions, but their curiosity about their own speech has been left unsatisfied-until now. Can an ape create a sentence? Science, 206, 891–902.'A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book.'Įveryone has questions about language. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 219–227. Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Automatic access of the meanings of words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics, 22, 1–31.

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Pacific Linguistics Conference. Lenguage de Signos Nicaragüense: A pidgin sheds light on the “creole?” ASL. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist, 86, 65–79. X-bar syntax: A study of phrase structure. Linguistics and cognitive science: Problems and mysteries. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173–221.Ĭarroll, J. Ann Arbor: Karoma.īickerton, D., & commentators.

Pinker the language instinct