I also hope to answer many natural questions about languages, like why there are so many of them, why they are so hard for adults to learn, and why no one seems to know the plural of Walkman. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret.įor the language lover, I hope to show that there is a world of elegance and richness in quotidian speech that far outshines the local curiosities of etymologies, unusual words, and fine points of usage.įor the reader of popular science, I hope to explain what is behind the recent discoveries (or, in many cases, nondiscoveries) reported in the press: universal deep structures, brainy babies, grammar genes, artifically intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral children, paradoxical brain damage, identical twins separated at birth, color pictures of the thinking brain, and the search for the mother of all languages. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. To put it as Pinker does, The language instinct, like the eye, is an example of what Darwin called ‘that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which justly excites our admiration,’ and as such it bears the unmistakable stamp of nature’s designer, natural selection, (Pinker, pg. The Language Instinct Steven Pinker Daniel Ben Levi FebruUncategorized Linguistics, Phonology, Semantics, Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct I recently picked up another one of Steven Pinker’s books, The Language Instinct.
I have never met a person who is not interested in language.
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