The Language Instinct summary

Chapter 1: We are all born

THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT BY STEVEN PINKER, 1994 What's in it for me? Discover why learning your first language was so easy. Why is it that you pick up your mother tongue so naturally, while trying to learn languages in adulthood sometimes feels like banging your head against a wall? And why is it that, barring the common mix-ups and misunderstandings, we are so adept at communicating with each other almost effortlessly?

The answers to these questions lie in the nature of language and our innate ability to communicate with words, our language instinct. In this summary, you'll learn how language is structured and why human beings are especially good at picking it up. In addition, you'll learn all about the neuroscience behind our amazing linguistic skills. You'll also discover how children use grammatical rules that nobody has taught them.

How you can intuitively differentiate one wug from two wugs. And why Siri has such a hard time figuring out what you said. Chapter 1 We are all born with a language instinct. Think for a moment about how easy it is to turn the thoughts in your head into meaningful sentences.

Where did this skill come from? While many people believe we learn grammar in the classroom, our knowledge of it precedes the moment we are born. Indeed, very young children have an innate understanding of grammatical structure that they couldn't possibly have learned. The idea that grammatical rules are hard-wired into the brain was first put forward by Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, children don't learn how to speak from their parents or anyone else, but rather by using their innate grammar skill. As a consequence, Chomsky reasoned, all languages have the same basic underlying structure. One of Chomsky's main arguments for this is the poverty of the stimulus, which demonstrates that children understand verb and noun structures they couldn't have learned. For example, to turn the phrase a unicorn is in the garden into a question, you must simply move the is to the front of the sentence.

However, for the phrase a unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden, you have to rearrange more than just the first is to turn the phrase into a question. To make a grammatically sound sentence, you have to move the second is. Chomsky correctly claimed that children would never make the mistake of misapplying the first strategy for creating a question to the second, more complex sentence. In subsequent experiments, no children moved the wrong is, even with sentences they could have never heard before.

Furthermore, deaf children use correct grammar in their signs without ever studying it. Psychologists studied a deaf boy named Simon, whose two deaf parents only learned sign language in adulthood and thus made various grammatical mistakes. Simon, on the other hand, didn't make the same mistakes, despite only ever being exposed to his parents' style of signing. The only way to account for this is that Simon had an innate knowledge of grammar that precluded him from making his parents' mistakes.

Chapter 2: Language is based on

Language is based on two principles, so how is it that we so effortlessly communicate with one another? Well, human language follows two principles which facilitate an ease in communication. The first principle is the arbitrariness of the sign. This idea, first introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, relates to the way in which we pair a sound with a meaning.

For example, the word dog does not sound like a dog. It doesn't bark like a dog, nor does it walk like a dog. The word has no inherent dogness, but nonetheless retains its meaning. Why?

Well, English speakers all make the same association between the sound dog and man's best friend through countless instances of rote learning. The arbitrariness of the sign is a huge benefit for language communities, as it allows them to transfer ideas near-instantaneously without having to rationalize pairing a particular sound with a particular meaning. The second principle is that language makes infinite use of finite media. In layman's terms, we have a finite set of words that we can combine to create an infinite number of larger things, i.

e. , sentences. We make sense of these infinite possible combinations by establishing rules that govern changes in word combinations. For example, what is the difference between dog bites man and man bites dog?

Apart from one being an unfortunate everyday occurrence and the other being newsworthy, the difference lies in the foundational grammar that governs meaning. Each of the words in dog bites man has its own individual meaning that doesn't depend on the complete sentence. Grammar is what allows us to arrange these words in specific combinations in order to evoke specific images and meanings. There's a finite number of words, but grammar gives us an infinite number of ways to combine them.