The Language Instinct
How the Mind Creates Language

There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies. "Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you......more

A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I......more

Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of lan......more

I have great respect for Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar, to the popularization of which Steven Pinker dedicates this work. The idea of a built-in mechanism of instinctive comprehension of language at the genetic level is a powerful incentive for those who want to study. It is sad that the......more

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on......more