The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

Linguistics is the paradigm for much recent work in literary criticism, anthropology, and genetics, each of which analyzes its subjects as systems of language. Language itself is the subject of a new book by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at MIT, whose insights offer the general reader entree into discoveries in cognitive science and speculations about human nature. The Language Instinct is an informed and impassioned discussion of what currently is being said about how and why people think and communicate.

Pinker takes forceful positions on many of the most controversial issues in linguistics. He argues that language is not taught in the usual sense of the term. Endorsing the theories of his colleague, Noam Chomsky, he maintains that it is instinctive and universal. Refusing to credit language to chimpanzees or dolphins, he insists that it is unique to Homo sapiens, a propensity that developed among our ancestral hominids as an evolutionary advantage. Pinker provides a lucid explication of Chomsky's concept of universal grammar, of how any three-year-old of our species is a linguistic genius, possessed of the potential to generate an infinite number of thoughts from a finite set of rules. Pinker traces the rich history of English and cautions that, of the 4,000-6,000 extant languages, approximately 90% face imminent extinction. He laments such a loss of linguistic...