🚀 go-pugleaf

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From: "CERDA,BARTOLOME,MR" <RJAP000@MUSICB.MCGILL.CA>
Subject: RE: Is language an instinct?
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Organization: McGill University
References:  <BASQUE-L%94042515131245@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 1994 04:38:37 GMT

In article <BASQUE-L%94042515131245@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> Marta-Lourdes Llano
 <EGMBH@CUNYVM.BITNET> writes:
>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.
>.
>.
I am extremely happy and credulous to know that nobody taught
Mr. Pinsker how to be articulate, funny, and witty. Maybe
somebody could teach him to be intellectually honest? If you
wish more info. read and have fun with "NIM" a Chimpanzee who
Learned Sign Language. by H.S. Terrace. 1979.
Xavier Cerda at rjap@musicb.mcgill.ca