Once upon a time I would have plowed through this tome, but even when I picked it up at a yard sale I have moved past my jejune hungers for omnibus explanations. Worthwhile if you can parse it tho ( )

Good read. In one of the last chapters i found a list of "traits" of a "Universal Man": a set of psychological & sociological elements intrinsical to any human individual and society world wide. A very solid rebuke to all kinds of racists & nationalists.

Groundbreaking then, passé now ( )

This is one I read some time ago and cannot recall enough about to review. ( )

beautiful explanation of a universal grammar ( )

This is my Bible--what I turn to for contemplation and reflection. I have pages of notes taken on Pinker's theories and am grateful for his "translation" of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar because I might never do it on my own.

Now I need some fiction... ( )

I will have to reread this one to write a relevant review, but I remember it as quite well-written and substantial. At the time, I was interested in AI. ( )

Ik wou al sinds geruime tijd iets van Steven Pinker lezen. Vooral z'n taalgerichte boeken sprongen er bovenuit. Aangezien dit een van de klassiekers in het wereldje is, was de keuze snel gemaakt. Ik heb echter wel voor deze heruitgave gekozen, omdat Pinker een kleine update eraan toegevoegd heeft.

Het is natuurlijk geen eenvoudige kost, maar Pinker heeft het toch zo toegankelijk mogelijk gemaakt. Het is geen droog, academisch werk - althans, het is niet op die manier geschreven -, wel wat losser, met hier en daar wat grappige verwoordingen en anekdotes.

Pinker beschrijft hoe taal ontstaat, welke invloeden er zijn, hoe het in elkaar zit (toch vooral wat het Engels betreft - je kunt het extrapoleren naar gelijkaardige talen qua techniciteit; je krijgt ook een les zinsontleding, m.i. een leuke opfrissing), hoe baby's ermee omgaan, hoe je met beperkte kennis toch zinnen kunt maken en je punt kunt maken of probeert te maken (vb. pidgin, creools, ...). Verder beschrijft hij hoe en waar (omstandigheden, situaties) taal gebruikt wordt, hoe spraaktechnologie erbij gekomen is, hoe je met taal kunt spelen, hoe de hersenen het mogelijk maken (en waarom andere dieren niet kunnen spreken zoals de mens, ook al leren we sommige soorten dat wel te doen: vogels, apen, honden, ...).

Maar dan komt er een moment waarop Pinker zich beter waant dan de rest en pedant, betweterig wordt; een moment waarin hij bijvoorbeeld bepaalde specialisten op hun plaats probeert te zetten door hun manier van denken aan te vallen. Wellicht heeft hij ergens gelijk, maar de manier waarop deed me toch de wenkbrauwen fronsen.

De extra's zijn wat korte info over z'n opvoeding, z'n studies, hoe dit boek tot stand is gekomen, z'n invloeden (o.a. Noam Chomsky), en hoe de wereld op vlak van taalonderzoek (incl. genetica, neurowetenschappen, e.d.) veranderd is sinds de eerste publicatie van het boek. Hier vertelt hij ook hoe het bepaalde personen en bevindingen vergaan is in de loop der jaren.

Pinkers pedant gedrag terzijde, is 'The Language Instinct' toch wel een aanrader voor wie zich voor taal, taalkundigheid, e.d. interesseert. Pinker gaat breed, behandelt verschillende aspecten zodat je eigen beeld over taal groter, diverser wordt dan voorheen.

[b:The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature|2813972|The Stuff of Thought Language as a Window into Human Nature|Steven Pinker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348133891s/2813972.jpg|2839893] staat op m'n wishlist, en gezien dit boek enigszins gerelateerd is aan 'The Language Instinct', wordt dit m'n volgende Pinker. Op termijn. ( )

Very interesting and easy to read! ( )

This is a book of 500 pages, counting the index (and a book this long badly needs an index, when it refers on page 400-something to a debunked urban myth mentioned on page 65). The author does go on and on and ON sometimes. Evolutionary theory of language is so unproven and unable to be proven historically, but Pinker certainly employs a lot of verbiage in the attempt.

High spots which may warrant keeping the book on the shelf include the discussion in Chapter 11, pp 334 ff, of ape "language" (basically a hoax, with a lot of self-deception by starry-eyed researchers); the Deaf community has been saying for years that ASL is not what language-trained apes are signing, and it's a relief to see that message validated and confirmed in mainstream popular linguistics... and the discussion centering around page 424 of how research reveals that human children from quite a young age have an innate sense that "living things fall into kinds with hidden essences", i.e. a shaved and painted raccoon is still a raccoon and not a skunk even if doctors operate and put a "sac of really smelly stuff" inside it; and that children are uncomfortable with the idea of a horse that has cow insides and cow parents. This kind of data has definite implications for gender theory in the elementary classroom and its effects on children's cognitive development and mental health. ( )

In this book, Pinker takes his theory on how language is partly genetically encoded in humans and dissects it. It does a great job at showcasing both it's strengths and weaknesses. Each chapter takes a different approach, so the best way to read it is with slight pauses between the chapters so you can digest what it was trying to convey and how it reflects on other topics like natural selection, grammar, art or history.

I was already accustomed with and a fan of Pinker's style and ideas, so there was a lot of confirmation bias for me to enjoy this one (which I'm unapologetic about). There were plenty of ideas in the book I was unaware of and ways of looking at language that I never thought of. I'm pretty satisfied with it since it lead me to update my view on how the mind creates and molds communication. ( )

A classic of popular (and at times, fairly academic) linguistics. The ideal gift for someone with an interest in language who's tired of hearing nothing about it in the mainstream but arguments over "proper" English and word origin fairy tales. ( )

This is listed as one of the New Scientist Top 25 Most Influential Popular Science books. The thesis is solid...the execution burdensome. Here's a thought: make a point; reinforce a point; if at that point you feel the need to keep talking, show the reader where in the footnotes or appendix all the repetitious extras can be found.

Pinker spends an enormous amount of time talking about language grammar and the English language in particular, none of which have anything to do with why language is instinctual. It would have been a lot more tedious if I hadn't just listened to John McWhorter's lectures on The Story of Human language. The parallels could not have been coincidental...both relating elements of language development, grammar structure, proto-languages...but McWhorter wasn't talking about instinct. He was talking about language. Pinker undermines his case with all the side trips down linguist lane. Focus on instinct, not on the idiosyncrasies of a hodgepodge tongue.

Pinker could have made his point very well in 100 pages. I admire succinct conveyance of knowledge. Pinker sure has a way of complicating concepts with extraneous details. I didn't admire this book. ( )

Pinker is always a good read, but this updated version clarifies some issues I had with older editions.

Full review @Booklikes ( )

I was disappointed a little bit, for I expected a more focused treatment of the relationship of language to its physical basis in the brain. On the other hand, the early chapters are an excellent explanation and introduction to modern linguistics. The excellence of the examples and illustrations suggest these chapters, at least, come from his teaching experience and lecture notes. The later chapters are interesting, as they deal with various aspects of language, but they don't really add up to a coherent exposition of the "language instinct". The chapter "The Language Mavens" is a diatribe against the language pundits of the media, which I thought irrelevant to his thesis.

Nevertheless, the book is chock full of interesting topics in language, and reminded me why I got into linguistics as a grad student. ( )

After six months and nine days, I have finally finished this beast of a book. It's hard to say what it is that made this book take so long. At 544 pages, it's hardly the longest book I've recently read. I do have a degree in Linguistics, so I can't say the subject matter was over my head. Maybe it's just that this book is so packed with information, examples, quotes, and evidence that my brain felt a little overloaded every time I picked it up. Because of that, I kept it in my purse, pulling it out over lunch, while traveling, while waiting for friends to show up, so on and so forth, until little by little, I came to the end.

And now that I've finished, I don't really know what to say. Some parts are wonderful - I'm partial to morphology and childhood language acquisition, so I flew through those pages. Other parts barely held my interest, such as the attempted construction of speaking machines. All in all, don't have a strong opinion either way on this book. It's a worthy read for anyone with a strong interest in language or linguistics, but the average person will probably get bored. ( )

This is a very fascinating read. Pinker argues that language is an innate human instinct, and that our brains have evolved to have certain grammatical structures hard-wired. He gets into all sorts of different sciences - neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology - and brings in a wealth of evidence to back up his ideas.

The book is ostensibly aimed at a general audience, and assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics. However, it digs really deep into a lot of linguistic concepts, and sometimes I found that to be overwhelming and/or tedious and/or more information than I really needed to understand his point. Then again, he also goes into some really long tangents about what Darwin really meant by "evolution" and some other topics that seemed to go on way too long and those were also overwhelming/tedious, so I found myself skimming quite a bit of the book.

Nonetheless, the information in here is fascinating, and Pinker has a nice wry wit and a pleasant writing style, so I enjoyed the book. ( )

This is my first read from Pinker, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A very accessible and insightful book that will profoundly affect the way you think about language. ( )

This is the first of Steven Pinker's book that I've read and I must say I like the way he writes. There were many instances in the book where he wrote about complex stuff in simple and effective language.

I felt at some points the text was very verbose while stating the obvious.

Well, not that I'm an expert on the subject, but I partially disagree him when he says:
"The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world."

I have read a few articles and a couple of books that state that the brain is plastic and one 'section' of the brain can be used for multiple 'actions'.

Reference: The Brain that Changes Itself

The chapter Family Values was the most interesting and I kept re-reading a few paragraphs just because I liked them so much.

"Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to." ( )

Dry. The linguistics-heavier sections are similar to what I've read before, and didn't seem especially well-done. Pinker seems unable to decide how pop to be - getting quite technical in some places, but failing to flesh out interesting examples. For example, I was interested by his note that "I haven't done any work" is functionally equivalent to the oft-deplored "I haven't done no work", but Pinker didn't continue on to consider "Have(n't) you done any work?", which only has a non-standard equivalent in the negative "Haven't you done no work?". Amorey Gethin has mentioned a number of other issues with the book as a whole. I also disagreed with some of his grammaticality judgements, which caused some problems. For example, "mice-eater" is just not correct in my English, sorry Pinker; the interesting question is not "why is an irregular plural permitted in this compound, but not a regular plural?" but "why do children make this mistake?". Pinker's whole idea is to support Universal Grammar, but he seems to rather jump at evidence; at the same time, I found the dearth of non-English examples a crippling weakness in such a project. ( )

Pinker's books are always easy to read and absorbing. I believe that this was his very first book for a popular audience and he certainly got off to a good start. However, he contradicts himself in the first chapter and in a later chapter seems unaware that "flitch" and "thole" not only sound like they might be English words, but actually are. I'm right there with him when he debunks some stupid usage rules, like the injunction not to split the infinitive. But, although I'm a computer scientist, and know my Chomsky hierarchy and context-free grammars very well, his more technical discussion of grammar seem not to make sense. Somehow, this book feels a little lightweight; probably I'm not quite his intended audience. ( )

I read this for my first and second language acquisition class, and while I didn't love it, I definitely didn't hate it either. I liked Pinker's use of examples when trying to describe complex language issues, however, I wished sometimes that he would have stopped at two or three examples per topic. Once or twice he would use an entire chapter simply to expound upon different examples that helped him make his point. I get it Mr. Pinker.

If you're into books on language, then go ahead and give this a read. ( )

If your not sure about this book. Just pick it up in the bookstore and turn to page 355. If find the chart there terribly amusing then go ahead and buy it. If not you might want to move on.

Pinker has obviously thought about this, a lot.

...people simply assume that words determine thoughts...Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist this is not the same as a bunch of words.

...if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can't be words.

Our sixth sense may perceive speech as a language, not as sound, but it is a sense, something that connects us to the world, and not just a form of suggestibility.

When a series of facts comes in succession, as in a dialogue or text, the language must be structured so that the listener can place each face into an existing framework.

This mirrors my thoughts exactly- not only for words but for knowledge in general.

...there is a specific syndrome called Pure Word Deafness that is exactly what it sounds like: the patients can read and speak, and can recognize environmental sounds ... but cannot recognize spoken words; words are meaningless...

Oh boy! This is sooo me! Often I have to visualize the written words before I can understand what was said.


Great advice Pinker received from one of his editors-

Think of your readers as your college roommates: people who are as smart and intellectually curious as you...



I agreed with most of his conclusions but he lost me at;

"The linguistic clumsiness of [age] might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies"

I just don't see why it has to be a zero-sum game.

It's funny that the next book I read was Paul Allen's biography. At the end he talks about how incredibly difficult it is to catalog and index vast amounts of information. Pinker was even mentioned by name! Certainly those two geniuses could pool their knowledge and come up with an algorithm based on Pinker's understanding of language to file and organize all that is known on a subject. ( )

It's a hard one to treat fairly, this. Pinker is trying to do three things: 1) provide a general introduction to how language and the science of language work; 2) debunk some common myths, from the really dumb ones about splitting infinitives and suchlike onward; and 3) give a polemical screed against linguists and psychologists, and there are many, who argue that language in general is not necessarily a dedicated human capacity and that Chomskyan generative grammar in particular is not necessarily what actually generates linguistic productions.

The first two tasks are relatively uncontroversial, and he completes them with reasonable aplomb. There are different choices a non-Chomskyan would have made about how to talk about certain things, of course, notably grammar (although I pity the poor general readin' fool that tries to slog through that chapter for reasons that have nothing to do with my opinions about the content--or Pinker's writing, which is fine--but merely that modelling syntax is a mess and a half and seemingly always will be). And I'm not quite sure his ridicule of the "language mavens" is always proportional to their sins (big difference between hamless logophily stuff like silly fake etymologies and shopping actual class shibboleths like split infinitives).

But it's in what amounts to the same old nature–nurture debate that Pinker makes me turn a little green. Pretty much every linguist and cognitive scientist out there these days, as far as I know, thinks nature–nurture is at most 70–30 one way or the other. That debate is dead, or has at least advanced far, far beyond the stage it's presented at here, and with clearer vision Pinker might have realized that what he was actually doing was engaging in a bit of linguistic historiography on what was a powerful and perennial clash for a long long time. Instead, like a good Chomskyan, he constructs straw men as opponents, reducing the "language is learned" position's scope so that it only covers people who think language is 100% learned and leave 0% room for an innate linguistic module (which is nobody at all, not since, I dunno, Skinner in the fifties?) and then treats all his opponents like they fall into that tiny box.

It's a way to sell copies, I suppose. But it makes you like th Bill Bryson of actual linguists, Steven Pinker, with your reducing Whorfian linguistic relativity to George Orwell's Newspeak, your reduction of learning to vulgar induction (pretty sure everyone in that camp thinks kids learn language mostly by pattern-finding and hypothesizing and trying things out), your trading of tired myths like the poverty of the stimulus and the idea that you can read a billion English (or whatever) sentences and never read the same one twice. Sometimes they are just little factual inaccuracies because you are trying to throw your discipline a coming-out party and want everyone to have a good time and want things to seem more exciting than they are, like when you overstate the scope of the McGurk effect. Sometimes, though, you're making choices that skew things in a more fundamental way, and you are most certainly not stupid, so I think it has to be intentional, building the broader perception of the field in your (camp's) image.

I think I won't even get into the generative grammar stuff, except to say that clearly if you're trying to make arguments about what kind of sentences we find syntactically appropriate even if semantically odd, "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" doesn't license you to take structurally very strange (but interpretable and plausibly grammatical) sentences as examples, because there is nothing weird about its grammar. I also want to say that obviously a general-learning theory that works is not rule- but token-based, and that the weirder and more different your sentences get form normal speech the less relevant it is whether you can make a tree that works for them, since obviously real speakers find them problematic, even if not in the same way as word salad. "Oooh, technically, this is a sentence!" Right, and you make the tree more and more complicated to deal with it, which is the sickness of syntax. "Just move this and this and this and the theory can handle it!" Even when it's quite evident that the human being cannot handle a sentence like that (e.g., with more than a few layers of embedded phrases). Working memory, jerk. It seems so clear that grammar is a few basic parameters and then convention and probabilism gradually laying in patterns over free variation within those parameters. (In this regard I wonder about Chomsky's "minimalism," which I don't know much about. It may be that it handles the rulehappiness of the old ways.)

It gets more innocuous after that. The chapter on language acquisition is good, although Pinker obviously has his biases as hinted above. I like the evolutionary explanation for the critical period--why spend limited genetic resources giving the old human abilities when statistically speaking the human is more likely to be young than old (since in the aggregate more of us are dead when we're e.g. 50 than 20, etc.), and when 90% (or whatever) of all people born will benefit from super language power at age 5 but only some smaller proportion at 35? And the the chapter on proto-language hypotheses (Nostratic, Proto-World, etc.) gives an interesting look into that freaky world (though it has nothing to do with language being an instinct--and there is another dumb error here where he says that the Indo-European people must have dominated everything from Ireland to India, obviously thinking of groups of them spreading out and hten staying in place and developing their different languages, when clearly migration and language differentiation happened simultaneously and in weird back-and-forth never-gonna-be-completely-traceable ways).

But then in the last chapter he's ushing his thesis again in this cowardly way where he deploys Fodor to say "I hate relativism" and some smuggy smug grad student to sneer at the caricaturized version of the standard social sciences model (NOBODY except far rightists thinks human cultures can vary freely and without limit forever, my god. You say this has been the model "since the 1920s" but I think you mean it was the model in the 1920s). And of course he implies by proxy that relativism is more totalitarian since the blank slate (which is what you need at the beginning to have relativism if you are going to take biological determinism off the table, since either our differences are rooted in cognition or in culture) is the dictator's dream. Where to start? First--of course there is a fascist relativism where groups are qualitatively, biologically different and other. And of course a totally blank slate, which nobody thinks is what a person is, can be abused. But there is also a fluid, polyphilic difference-of-tendencies rooted in the various manifestations of culture that leads us to multiculturalism and good things. Pinker seems to be blaming relativism for both the biological and cultural variants, which is silly considering no one relativist can hold both positions.

And alongside Pinker's "we're all one fam" nativist universalism there is clearly a totalitarian universalism where there is one single biological human nature and those who fall outside it are illegit. (In practice, of course, Pinker's universal human nature is more or less neoliberal--he is keen to reject Chomsky's progressive politics.)

And the list of universals across cultures he gives from the work of Donald Brown is interesting and inspiring and takes up several pages (everything from gossip to tool use to extended families some form of privacy urge for sex to a "natural biology" where we recognize the differences between organisms as qualitatively different from those between other objects--so humans have no problem with a wheelchair being furniture and a vehicle but a big problem with a mule being a donkey and a horse--no, it's a mule, crossculturally!)

This would make a great beach read if you felt no compunctions about skipping the sentence trees and if you didn't have a lot invested in the universalism/relativism and naturalism/arbitrarism debates, which I currently seem to. I'll be less judgy when my MA thesis is done, pinks. ( )

As the title of this book might suggest, Steven Pinker, following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, contends that humans are born with an innate instinct for language. Not with language itself, obviously, but with mechanisms in our brains that make it easy for us to learn language and that account for commonalities of structure that exist across all languages, despite their obvious variability. Some of Pinker's arguments and conclusions are stronger than others, but the general idea seems pretty sound to me, although I know there's still some controversy over it, two decades later.

Pinker goes into a lot of detail about how languages are structured and how our brains process that structure. I found this detail quite interesting, but rather slow going, despite the fact that Pinker's prose is very accessible to the layman and is broken up here and there with moments of humor or the occasional whimsical quotation. Those who are just looking for a general overview of the subject might find those chapters, which make up about half the book, to be a bit much, but if you're at all interested in the nitty-gritty details of how the human brain constructs sentences, it's well worth reading. ( )