In reviewing Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, I do not give this work the highest ranking, nor the lowest, but the most average, not because I want to discourage its reading but because I want it read as I read, critically.
I approach the book from the perspective of that large community of people who seek to learn a second language as adults. The whole focus of Chomsky, and also of Pinker as his inept disciple, is elsewhere, on the initial acquisition (as opposed to learning) of language. Chomsky actually says very little about “the language instinct” per se. He says that language is innate and complex, and beyond that remains deeply skeptical regarding most of what is said of language. As a consummate scientist, Chomsky is cautious and self-critical, not, like Pinker, inclined to undisciplined pseudo-scientific speculation. There is a fine line between saying that language need not be laboriously taught to children because they are inclined to learn language at the proper time, and saying that adults need not bother trying to learn because when they are over four years old they are already too old.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not accusing Professor Pinker of discouraging adult language education, only suggesting that there is an urgent need for ESL and a real unaddressed danger that this book will be misunderstood as essentially anti-grammatical. Other teachers have often tried to persuade me that we should not waste time trying to teach grammar because it bores the students, but strangely my students seem more grateful than bored. In any case, when it is boring it is boring for a reason, which I make a point of explaining to the class. The grammar of your first language may seem boring because you think you know it, but you must be sure you know it well because only then can it becomes the basis for acquiring a different language. Perhaps I am over-sensitive, but Professor Pinker does seem insensitive to the needs of language learners, and that insensitivity in the context of virulent opposition to the immigrant community seems to me the pedagogical equivalent of collateral damage.
I disagree with most of the reviews I have read of this work, to the extent they have any substance at all. Most of the positive evaluations say that Pinker is entertaining, and many say that he helps us better understand Chomsky. I contend that neither is substantively true. Regarding the latter, Pinker offers nothing on Chomsky beyond taking the weakest link in Chomsky's science and treating it as absolute dogma. As for being entertaining, this subjective assessment is irrelevant to the subject at hand. If there were a Guinness prize for the largest collection of ambiguous absurdities in a single volume The Language Instinct would be a contender, and if you find this entertaining you have my condolences. Many examples of ambiguous absurdities can be found on the internet, and most of these are recycled by Pinker for our amusement. I find it more tedious than entertaining, and must observe that no effort is made to treat ambiguity as a problem or to suggest ways that the problem might be avoided. To mention a single example, used more than once by Pinker, the ambiguity in the expression “Dr. Ruth talks about sex with Dick Cavett,” is the simple result of misplacing a prepositional phrase, simply resolved by moving that phrase to the correct position, thus “talks with Dick Cavett about sex” is not ambiguous, and is therefore more correct usage. This ambiguity could be seized as an opportunity for teaching improved usage. Pinker's failure to use his own data to draw relevant and obvious observations that could actually inform us of something useful is a major defect of the book. Rather than entertaining, then, I would characterize Pinker as misleading and obsessively cute, to the detriment of his entire argument.
If third person singular is so easy a child can do it, why does it still confuse Steven Pinker?
Much of the discussion of what Chomsky now calls “generative grammar” focuses on the enduring mystery of early language acquisition. It is indeed a remarkable fact that children “universally” have the apparent ability to acquire a first language, sometimes more than one, during a critical period of development, mostly between the ages of two and four years. Little is known of how this process works, and Pinker adds nothing but idle speculation to the little Chomsky gives us. The main contribution of this school of thought is negative: it does give us some insight into why learning a second language would be difficult but none into the question of how it works, nor indeed how it is possible at all; yet it clearly is possible. Pinker's “entertaining” and verbose description of the third person singular conjugation only demonstrates that an inaccurate descriptive grammar can be even worse than a purely arbitrary prescriptive grammar.
Pinker's description of the conceptual difficulty of the third person singular conjugation grossly exaggerates that difficulty, and is thus more polemical than scientific. In stark contrast to Chomsky, who is content to say that the innateness of the language capacity is tautologous, Pinker seems to think that genetics are magical, and that this genetic magic is proved necessary by the arbitrariness and complexity of rules. I base my contrary view on the experience of having taught many adult students to master this essentially simple grammar.
The first step in the transformation is profoundly anti-instinctual. The strongest instinct of the adult student of a second language is to take their mother tongue as a template for all language and to seek a code that permits thinking in the first language and translating word for word. It is hard to break this instinct, but it must be overcome because it simply doesn't work. Language is not code.
The second step is to know the grammar of your first language explicitly rather than implicitly. In other words, the student of a second language must relearn what they already know and learn it by the rules. It does little good to describe the form of the third person singular to a student who does not understand that terminology. Yet it is easy, because the English language is nearly devoid of conjugation, the verb to be and the third person singular being the only exceptions. So to keep it simple we must offer a simple definition of what we mean by third person. The first and second person work together as a pair to engage in conversation. Every conversation, in any language, is between the first and second person, which change places as the conversation proceeds. The third is the other person, the one not in the conversation, whom you and I are talking about but to whom we do not speak.
The last step is simply the recognition that, with the exception of irregular plural nouns (men, women, children, people) there is ordinarily exactly one -s or -es suffix between the noun and verb as a pair. This is best demonstrated with one of the words that can be either noun or verb, for example the word cook. So we discover that in the singular “a cook cooks,” while in the plural the suffix moves from one word to the other so that “cooks cook.” Similarly, ducks duck and a duck ducks, although admittedly the word duck does not quack.
Responding to critics who say we ought to have found the genetic basis for Universal Grammar if it exists, Chomsky observes that “it is fiendishly difficult to find the genetic basis for anything.” Fair enough, but surely we must remain skeptical of the existence of any gene when the only evidence for it is our need to explain the phenomenon it claims to explain. The existence of genes that generally support human language in a variety of ways is not at issue for me, and I understand and fully accept that it is not the intention of “universal” (or better “generative”) grammar to facilitate second language learning but only to seek scientifically meaningful explications for first language acquisition, yet must wonder if it is too much to ask that advocates of the universality pretense desist from disseminating disinformation about grammar. If there are no rules then there can be no rule against rules, and we do well to embrace those accurate descriptive rules that enhance communication.
Theodore Cleaver may not be a furry rodent with oversized incisors employed by the Army Corps of Engineers, but dams are still built by beavers.
The Advocates of the generative grammar concept tend to make imaginary instincts necessary by offering inadequate solutions to contrived problems. In comparing an active voice “Beavers build dams” to a passive voice expression of the same idea, “Dams are built by beavers,” Pinker claims that “down in the verb phrase...the nouns are playing the same roles in both sentences,” but that “up at the sentence (IP) level...they are playing different roles. The active sentence is saying something about beavers in general, and happens to be true; the passive sentence is saying something about dams in general, and happens to be false (since some dams...are not built by beavers).”
But this is patent nonsense. If it were true that an analysis involving the I-bar schema could change the truth value of an expression plotted in it, this would seem a compelling argument against relying on such schema, but fortunately it is not true. Neither the active nor the passive form of this equivalent expression says anything about beavers in general or dams in general, rather both are quite specific, the first concerning beavers that build dams, the second concerning dams that are built by beavers. The Grand Coulee, built by the Corps of Engineers under FDR is mentioned in neither, and is therefore quite irrelevant, both on the surface and in any imaginary deep structure.
Can eagles that swim fly?
The last thing I want is to prove Chomsky wrong, and there is actually no need to do so. My objection to Pinker has little to do with Chomsky, despite appearance to the contrary. Pinker takes Chomsky's tautology and treats it as empirical fact, and insists on this “fact” as a dogma. Chomsky, to his credit, has always been careful to avoid this. Pinker lacks Chomsky's logical discipline and scientific rigor, and so undermines Chomsky's legacy by being associated with it.
Our alternate hypothesis is that phrases can be generated, creating their syntax word by word without resort to an innate universal grammar or intrusive genetic mutations re-wiring the brains of babies. That is not to say that it is somehow wrong to say that language is innate. The idea of some selective pressure for the production of language in our species does not properly belong to the Darwinian paradigm in any case, even if we can rationalize a place for it there. The question of selective advantage is a quite different matter. Selective advantage can be and often is the result of innovation rather than mutation. All humanity shares species being with Louis Pasteur, and are more likely to survive to reproductive age because of the development of the germ theory of disease. I have no idea whether Robert Fleming inherited any genetic disposition toward microbiology from his nobel prize winning father Sir Alexander Fleming, but that is quite irrelevant, as being of the same species as his father was sufficient for him to benefit from the survival advantages of his father's discovery of penicillin. With that in mind, our search for the elusive grammar gene seems quite quixotic. Moreover, it is precisely language, whether instinctive or somehow learned through a process we do not understand, that empowers us to teach our children myriad things that our genes and theirs neglect to mention. We moderns seem obsessed with worship of our genome, a kind of “genomolatry” that is as unscientific as it is blasphemous.
Okay, but what about syntax, if it is neither learned nor genetically dictated, what is it and where does it come from? Syntax: the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. If it is neither learned nor genetically determined I think it can only be an invention. We ought not over-think this phenomenon.
Let's begin with a single word, the termination of a problematic expression that is often used pedagogically by Chomsky, the word fly. What questions does the word suggest, and what answers to previous questions are implicit in it? The one word answer could be responding to a question like “What do they do?” Having an element of doing in our emergent sentence we might now wish to add an element of being. We can readily do this with another verb, provided we use the determiner “that” at its front, thus we ask “What are they that fly” and answer “Those that swim fly.” “What are those that swim and fly?” “They may be insects, flying fish, or birds.” “What birds swim, fly and duck?” “Ducks swim, fly and duck.” “What birds swim and duck but do not fly?” “Penguins.” “And what about eagles?”. “Eagles that swim fly.” “Is that possible? Can eagles that swim fly?” Indeed, eagles that swim fly.
Any who have studied Chomsky will recognize this pedagogical question. Whenever I have heard him ask this question in a lecture, I have noticed that he pauses slightly before the word “swim” as if “instinctively” aware that it is not the most obvious action for an eagle, even where the discussion is purely for demonstration. Notice also that nowhere in this dialogue has the affirmative expression “Eagles that swim can fly” appeared. Why not? It is logically identical to the simpler affirmative without the word can. Thus the word can is added at the beginning of the emergent phrase like all the other added words. There is no “motion,” and putting the auxiliary in its rule-based place at the beginning of a yes/no question needs not leaves a trace anywhere. Notice also that this is done with no reliance on a tedious I-bar schema, with no need for a grammar gene, and with no need to intrusively re-wire a baby's brain. That the baby's brain is language ready is indeed tautologous, just as Chomsky has always said. It is ready to acquire language not because it has a language instinct but simply because it is a human child. When she grows up she may overcome her instincts enough to learn Spanish as well.
In sum, if any still imagine that this book is entertaining and informative I would encourage you to critically compare it to this brief review. I am entertaining and informative, Steven Pinker is really just silly. PAMitchell
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I will not feel pain to study tedious grammar. Any one who write in English is ...
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2017
This book is rather famous and I have read it through. If I have the instinct for language studying, I will not feel pain to study tedious grammar. Any one who write in English is easy to make this or that kind of grammar mistakes, usage mistakes or something. Anyway,the quality of the book is good.Look at the fake dictionary I bought from Amazon China Look at the Chinese characters still failed to be cut out and the poor binding.Now, Amazon China is selling fake commodities in the name of importing from abroad to Chinese customers- books or dictionaries are just the tip of the iceberg. And the my complaint has lasted for over 2 months without refund unless I provide them my personal information for 20% discount. Who dare to disclose personal information to a liar- Amazon China?
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2017
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