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THE ECONOMIST - APRIL 9TH 1994 - Page 95

LIFE'S CHATTERBOXES
The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind
By Steven Pinker
Allen Lane; 494 pages

A scientist, almost by definition, is somebody who does not rely
too much on his common sense. If he did, he would never get his
mind around such ideas as geological time and relativity, let alone
the theory that the earth is spherical. Yet, occasionally, common
sense bites back. Edifices of elaborate theorising are brought
tumbling to the ground by that good old nostrum: "If you think
about it..."

This book is a triumph of common sense over some of the nonsense
that has dominated psychology and linguistics for much of this
century. Again and again it uses the simplest of argument and
evidence to demolish myths which have encrusted the study of human
language: that children are taught grammar by their parents; that
the way people speak affects the way they think; that chimpanzees
can learn sign language; that language cannot be a product of
evolution because half a language is no use; that split infinitives
are wrong.

If you show a three-to-five-year-old child a puppet and say, "This
munster eats mud; it's a mud-eater," then show it a different
puppet and say it eats mice, the child quickly gets the message and
says: "It's a mice-eater."  But if you say it eats rats, the child
rarely says: "It's a rats-eater." Even at the age of three,
children treat irregular and inflected plurals differently.

This is one of many experiments and arguments that Steven Pinker
brings to bear on his central claim that language is an instinct,
not an artefact of culture. You did not as a child learn a language
from your parents or anybody else; you learnt the vocabulary of
your language, true, but not the underlying grammar. Nobody taught
you the rules of inflection and word order, or corrected your
mistakes. You simply plugged the lexicon of your language into a
developing part of your brain that already "knew" how to discern
the rules of language structure.

Some of the evidence for this theory is extraordinary, from the way
the pidgin languages (grammar-free tongues developed by adults who
do not share a common one) turn into fully grammatical Creoles as
soon as they are learnt by children, to the way damage to a certain
part of the brain can disrupt a certain aspect of grammar. Above
all, the evidence comes from language itself. This book is a rich
store of insights into how people use words, phrases and sentences.

Mr. Pinker is a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. His ideas are a fusion of the new science of cognitive
psychology with the linguistics of Noam Chomsky--whose discovery of
"universal grammar", incidentally, has made him, despite the
density of his prose, the only living member of the top ten most
cited writers in the humanities. (He is number sever--the others,
in order, are Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, the Bible, Aristotle,
Plato, Freud, Hegel and Cicero.) Cognitive psychologists treat the
brain not, as the behaviorists did and as many artificial
intelligencers do, as a general purpose processor, but as a bundle
of highly specialised instincts designed by evolution to learn
certain things. Mr. Chomsky's universal grammar is one such
instinct.

If language is an instinct, then certain implications follow.
There can be no such thing as incompetent or impoverished dialects,
because language is not a product of culture.  Indeed, Mr. Pinker
shows how the slang of a black ghetto is as rich and grammatical as
the conversation in a university common room.  This is one of many
examples of how the "nurture" school of social science is far more
of a friend to prejudice than the "nature" school, let alone the
"both" school to which all commonsensical people belong.

It does not, of course, rule out the idea that some people speak
and, especially, write in ways that are boring or ambiguous.  But
it does shed fresh light on "prescriptive grammar"--all those
pedantic rules about split infinitives and the like--because the
pedants are kept in business only by the fact that their rules are
by definition contrary to the natural grammar.  Infinitives ache to
be split in English because compound verbs are often split; just
because they were single words) is no reason to not split them in
English.

A book about language had better be well written, and Mr. Pinker's
book is superbly so.  Rarely can such a rich harvest of new ideas
and profound insights have been made so accessible by one of their
inventors.  Whether he is laying into Washoe chimptrainers,
Whorfian deconstructionists and language marvens such as William
Safire, or teasing out examples of how the brain encodes meaning
through sentence structure, he is unfailingly articulate, funny and
clear.  This book is to Chomsky as Shakespeare is to Spenser.