Customer Reviews

The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar

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The Principle and Parameters approach in linguistics is one of Chomsky's most profound theoretical insights, and its elegance and depth in explaining linguistic phenomena across languages is one of the most impressive achievements in linguistics. Baker's book is the best popular introduction to the approach that I have read. It is not as fun and entertaining as Pinker, but it is certainly as understandable, and it does not "dumb down" quite as much as Pinker. The book is a quick read, and contains an impressive chapter on Mohawk. Baker takes the theoretical approaches that he introduces earlier in the book, applies it to the case of Mohawk, formulates a novel explanation, and shows how we can get a deep understanding of the structure of Mohawk from a few, easily understood and elegant principles.

All in all, the book is an excellent introduction to how linguistics is done, and the models through which linguists currently think about languages and linguistic phenomena. It gives the best, most understandable explanation of central theoretical concepts such as "parameter" and "I-language" that I have seen, and gives a brief overview of "optimality theory" and other hypotheses in competition to Chomsky's version of P&P.

There is much to learn from this book, but I think that only those with a genuine interest in and sympathy to generative linguistics will find this book illuminating. To appreciate the depth and insight of the Principles and Parameters approach, you need some mastery of the technicalities and constructions, and mastery of the technicalities requires patience. To understand the problems and solutions that arise, you have to be willing to sit, think, and go over words and sentences in exotic languages slowly, including their inflections, affixes, and word order. Baker provides enough so that anyone can understand them; but you will still need to spend some time on these sections. I recommend this book to educated readers with some competence in linguistics, or to those who have a genuine interest in learning about generative grammar by looking at specific exotic languages.

The title of the book comes from the realization that the syntax of languages may be composed of true elements, like atoms which can normally combine only in particular ways so that certain kinds of langauges will not occur, or will do so for only for a short time before decomposing into a more stable type of language.

Linguists are still in the process of identifying these atoms and Baker is giving a popular account of the current state of investigation.

Mark C. Baker explains modern attempts to break down and categorize language by its syntax and by binary parameters that work thoughout each language providing rules that people following unconsciously in generating new utterances within any particular language.

He demonstrates that languages can be catagorized according to particular parameters which don't appear to have ANY relationship to the culture of the people speaking the language. For example, in building phrases within phrases most languages consistantly add new elements to phrases to create a larger phrase either always at the begnning of the smaller phrase or always at the end.

This seems to refute beliefs that differences in languages indicate fundamental differences in world views. Factually people of almost identical culture live side by side speaking languages that differ drastically syntactically.

So languages seemingly do NOT vary from each other in unlimited ways. Therefore there MUST be rules about what does and does not NORMALLY happen and presumably rules to the exceptions and to the exceptions to the exceptions.

These rules would be innate in human consciousness and would provide the foundations on which the actual syntax of a languages is based.

Languages can be classified syntactically according to type and sub-type and so forth entirely independantly of any genelogical relationships between them.

Baker's writing is lucid and transparent and he lets his subject matter and the puzzles it presents carry the excitement in the book.

This is a lucid, exciting introduction to the fascinating science of modern linguistics. With a minimum of technical jargon, the author shows us how different the languages of the world look - and how similar they really are. With the periodic table of the elements as a guiding metaphor, the author shows how languages form an intricate pattern, and lets us in on some of the discoveries he and other linguists have made about this pattern. The book teaches us about languages as exotic as Mohawk, and left me (at least) quite impressed with the wonders of the human mind. Some of the material towards the end of the book is less impressive, as the author speculates about what it all means, but by then the reader is well and truly hooked anyway, so the flaw is minor.

It's always interesting when a researcher provides an account of current work that can be understood by the general public, and that's what Mark Baker does in "The Atoms of Language." His general approach, which was pioneered by Noam Chomsky, is to explain the differences among languages in terms of a small number of "parameters" that characterize the phrasal grammar of the language. For example, whether the subject comes before or after the verb phrase, or whether the verb comes before or after its object.

Baker explains the technical concepts in an understandable way, and gives examples from many languages: English, Japanese, Mohawk, and Greenlandic Eskimo, to name just a few. He interestingly appeals to analogies from chemistry and bread-making, although these don't have to be taken seriously. In the final chapter, Baker steps back from the details of grammar to consider related ideas ranging from child language development to historical linguistics.

Much of the work is controversial; parameter theory is accepted by some linguists and disparaged by others. It is also not the easiest book to read, given the amount of detailed information that it contains. There are no prerequisites, but probably the readers who will enjoy it most are those who are already interested in language and know a bit about it. The biggest positive of the book is that readers will learn about an important topic of recent interest, by way of exploring some of the major grammatical differences in a wide variety of the world's languages.

Mark Baker's Atoms of Language uses the analogy of the Periodic Table of Elements to describe the basis of the Principles and Parameters theory of language construction that grew out of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Programme.
A set of small, minute particles assembled in certain finite order make up the infinite variety of the world and universe. Baker's analogy is apt and accessible. His explanation of Principles and Parameters is a solid, if basic, introduction to some heady ideas. While not the best introduction to linguistics, it does provide a path into a line of thought that seems, to me at least, to reflect the beginnings of a genuine working theory of the commonality of languages.
I can recommend the Kindle version with a caveat. A trifle, really. There is no image of the front cover provided, and when you download the book into your device (or my case, app), the back cover stand in for the cover image. How unfortunate.

The Atoms of Language by Mark Baker

One way of looking at this book is that it deals with what Mr. Baker calls the "Navajo Code Talker" paradox (that's basically the author's engaging way of introducing his subject): languages on this planet are very much alike (within limits, any human can learn any language) but also very different. The best example of this is the use of the "Navajo Code Talkers" during WWII: those american citizens were enrolled to translate important messages into their own language (Navajo) for communication on the battle front. The expectation was that Navajo being a hard language, Japanese code breakers would find it difficult to "decrypt" the messages. It appears the initiative was highly successful as the Japanese never managed to "break the code", showing that languages can be very different. But the fact that it is possible to translate back and forth between Navajo and English also shows that languages are not completely non-commensurable. So we have a bit of a paradox.

Mr. Baker uses throughout the book a chemical analogy: there are basic ingredients in the human psyche which he calls the atoms of language. What we observe in nature are the much more complicated analogues of molecules, with many atoms put together and interacting in interesting and not always predictable ways. I'm honestly not sure the analogy is particularly compelling, but the author does not take it so far that it becomes annoying.

So what are Mr. Baker's atoms? They're a bit abstract, even as far as atoms go, since they are really parameters for languages' grammars. If you've got a bit of a computer science mind, this might make some intuitive sense: if I want to produce procedurally an "object" that represents a grammar, what parameters do I need to specify to have a complete description of the grammar? If you're not into this kind of thinking the author will do quite a bit of fairly competent handholding to get you to the point where you should understand what he's saying.

Now what's so interesting about all this? First of all, it appears that parameters are not set randomly. There are certain combinations of parameters that are basically non-sequitur. That's not something that would have been obvious in advance, but it's equally well something that's not particularly easy to interpret. The author actually acknowledges that we don't have the final word on this topic.

In summary, this book provides a fairly pedagogical introduction to a rather advanced current research topic. I'm not entirely convinced that the atom and chemistry analogy route chose by the author was the best way to introduce the subject, but at the end of the day I must acknowledge he gets his point across.

TAoL is a deeply engaging and highly rewarding book. And brief to boot. It's also quite challenging. Unless you're a professional linguist, however (I'm not), you needn't lose yourself in the morass of evidence Baker cites in support of his argument. Stretches of this book can be skimmed without jeopardizing one's understanding of and appreciation for the overarching claim it sustains: that many of the grammatical/syntactic (as opposed to lexical) distinctions among world languages hinge on a relatively small number of deep structural "parameters" which specify, e.g., the location of subjects v. objects in relation to verbs and whether verbs do or do not incorporate affixes that reflect different elements of sentence syntax. Baker identifies a number of parameters -- essentially binary yes/no switches -- which, in the book's conclusion, he organizes into a branching hierarchy according to the relative strength of their effects on languages. Taking this approach to language classification -- as opposed to the more familiar genetic descent type classifications of languages (e.g., the Indo-European 'family') -- brings vivid and fascinating interlingual connections into relief. A lot of TAoL is taken up with showing why, e.g., certain Indo-European languages are structurally less akin to each other than they are to languages disparately spread across the globe. All this raises fascinating questions to do with the origins of language, the relation between language and cognition, and how it is that languages evolve. At the end of TAoL, Baker tentatively addresses these and other questions. As Baker notes, the parametric study of languages is in its early stages (which he compares to that stage in the history of the field of chemistry when the table of elements was still being constructed). TAoL masterfully describes the state-of-the-art as of Baker's writing. Baker has fired my interest in following this emerging sub-field of linguistics as it develops.

Atoms Of Language provides an unusual scientific survey of the world's languages, examining the elements human language holds in common around the world, and the theory first proposed by linguist Noam Chomsky that languages abide by a common set of rules. Baker postulates a new 'periodic table of language' in an intriguing breakthrough blend of linguistics and science.

Baker looks for (and claims to have found) the fundamental elements of all language that can account for the apparently enormous differences among languages. The fact that people are kept apart by language is a perplexing mystery. We all share so much of life's experience, it seems outrageous that we are Balkanized by language into almost mutually exclusive cultures. Any clue to overcoming that absurd fact of the human condition would be welcome. Baker distinguishes well between the surface expression of language and the Chomskyan "deep structures." I read with interest and anticipation until about halfway through when the author confessed that he treats language purely as a formal system. That means he looks at it as a closed set of rules, like the rules of chess or Morse code, so that understanding and explanation of languages are taken as mere logical puzzles. What a disappointment! As a psychologist, I am convinced that language is a cognitive process, an expression of our mental faculties and our experience in the world. Language is not a self-contained logical puzzle, and the only way we will ever understand it is to connect it to experience. In the end, Baker's book is an exercise in puzzle-solving for the sake of puzzle-solving. His concluding list of universal language parameters, while clever and impressive in their own right, lack "psychological validity" and leave us no more able to scale the tower of Babel.

Language has always been of interest to me. In Baker's book, Atoms of Language, he compares linguistics to chemistry looking at patterns of words, syntax and verbs to show how languages can be grouped together. If we know that languages follow certain orders, then we know they follow others as well. He examines different groups of languages such as polysnthetic languages and different basic word order types such as subject-verb-object and verb-subject-object languages, those than can make verbs out of adjectives and so forth.