A good portion of this book can be summed up in the relatively simple graph that was making the rounds on Twitter a while back: https://twitter.com/robdrummond/statu.... However, Pinker is a good enough writer that reading about the issue in book-length format rarely feels boring, as he throws about a plethora of interesting examples and anecdotes to illustrate the point. What’s more, the book skips around quite a bit, covering just about every aspect of general linguistics I could think of that actually interests me – how language works, how it was created, how the brain produces it, how various internal and external processes shape it, etc.

I do have objections, of course, one of them being that for a book that very loudly proclaims to be about language in general, it retains a strong English-leaning slant – there is quite some talk, for instance, about how English spelling is an optimal system of representing speech vocalizations on paper, which comes off as a really weird claim to someone reared in a writing system with a phonetic alphabet/script (Serbian Cyrillic, and to an extent, Serbo-Croatian Latin).

The segment on Chomsky and the structure of deep grammar/mentalese also suffers quite a bit in audiobook format. The narrator really makes an effort, but some of the structures described, while probably quite clear at a mere glance at a hand-drawn diagram, become an impenetrable forest of P(NP)VPs when read out loud.

On the other hand, the majority of the objections I saw here, glancing through the comments, boil down to either “boo-hoo, I disagree with his views, therefore this is a bad book” or “Pinker’s presentation is simplistic cherry-picking of straw-man arguments”. Well, one may disagree with what he’s saying, but Pinker does mention very specific sources and research his arguments lean on, and my humble academic experience with some of the opposition to his views leaves me inclined towards aligning with the theories presented herein. As for simplistic? Probably, but this is not a university textbook, so I don’t see the problem. He does what he meant to do, present an overall state of play in linguistics at the time of writing for a more-or-less lay audience. My edition also has a neat addendum at the end, where he looks back after more than a decade has passed, and discusses some of the changes and reactions to the contents of the book.

A fairly complex book that I would have to read several times to internalize all it offers. It is a bit too analytical for my taste, but I did learn some worthwhile points. Language is a uniquely human experience (not earth-shattering news, but no other animal has any capacity for language even remotely close to ours - something Steven Pinker enjoys pointing out as he repeatedly debunks relevant animal studies). Language is much more sophisticated in its make up (grammar, syntax, morphology, vocabulary...), in its constant evolution from generation to generation, in its innate relationship between mind, concept, sound, and transmission; and, thus, how it is learned. As (overly) thorough as always Pinker challenges conventional thought and education about language and introduces concepts of linguistics, psychoanalysis, neurology, and social science to make his various points. My biggest take-aways (among dozens offered) are: we are all born ready-wired to learn languages, but the ability to learn / speak different languages fluently rapidly deteriorates as soon as we are physically matured; languages are in constant flux as they are passed from generation to generation - as each generation actively refines & remodels what they receive in words, conventions and rules, then successively passes on minor changes (usually in more logical and simpler patterns) and introduces new words that capture old and new concepts more accurately or in usefully new nuances. What often passes as ignorance of grammar or spelling or syntax are actually modifications purposefully introduced to ease communication and improve understanding. Along the journey of this book I learned a lot more about why English is constructed as it is, why changes occurred in English over the past millennium, why it is progressively difficult to learn new languages as one ages, why and how languages continue to evolve, and why language is so uniquely human.

I usually "go with the feeling" when I review books, so it's really difficult to review non-fiction. But I'll try anyway.

The language history was an easy, but satisfying popular-science read. I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in linguistics or language in general.

Given the current divide in linguistics between the Functional/Cognitive theoretical approach to language and the formalist, generative approach which Pinker supports and has largely popularized with this book, The Language Instinct is an intellectually irresponsible endeavor. He frames linguistic nativism as a non-negotiable fact when actually, there is a fierce debate within linguistics which is moving away from ideas of those like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. The opposing school of thought argues that although the cognitive underpinnings of language are innate (having developed in evolutionary time), language itself is more like a new machine made out of old parts, which develops in social interaction and cannot be localized in any set of genes or related to any "instinct."

Fraught with error, Pinker's pseudo-science is based on an approach that seeks not to fully understand the nature of real language as it exists, as it evolves over time, and as it is acquired by young children - but to rehash a pre-supposed view of language that was developed by "linguists" philosophizing as they sat in their armchairs in the 50s and 60s, fundamentally concerned with abstracting language into mathematical elegance rather than recognizing it for the complex system that it is. I highly recommend anyone who found themselves nodding at every turn as they read this book to read Tomasello's response "Language is not an Instinct" (to be found in full just by doing a google search). And I quote, "At heart, Chomskyan nativism is a philosophical endeavor to discern by means of logic what is uniquely and innately human. Cognitive and Functional approaches are scientific endeavors aimed at understanding how people learn and use natural languages." Couldn't have said it better myself.

One star for effort, Pinky-Poo.

A book that tells you all that you might want to know about how humans are able to communicate with language. Pinker praises the work of Chomsky and tries to show that the fundamentals of language are built into the human mind, an instinct that is refined by our natural surroundings. He gives many examples of a fundamental grammar that all humans speaking whatever language have, which they use to organize sentences in their own language even if the sentence structures of two different languages are very unlike on another. He uses Darwin’s theory to show how language has evolved. Part of the book explains how sounds are made, while another explains as much as we know about how the brain forms sentences. One of his most interesting chapters shows that experts in a language that lay down the rules of grammar are no more experts than 5 year olds who converse with each other because language itself is ever changing. Many “rules” are no more relevant than if we kept the rules of old English. In fact he shows how these “experts” make rules that are counterintuitive to the language instinct. Overall the book is a bit technical at points particularly with his endless diagrams of sentence structure in the first half of the book, but Pinker does a very good job of explaining the intricacies of language to the masses.

era pa clase, pero me ha parecido bastante interesante, aunque no sé qué opinar sobre un libro que habla sobre la lingüística, sintaxis… de hace 30 años jajjaja

pd: hay estudios chulos, pero pinker va de gracioso y a veces guele

This book claims to be many things, but fails to deliver. First of all, it is way too long and technical to qualify for the usual pop science non fiction. Steven Pinker would definitely benefit from the good editor (unless this was deliberately done to provide hefty volume for more money). There are very few groundbreaking theories or ideas here, just the repetition on and on of the same ones. The author likes to introduce certain idea, then provide evidence based on different (almost all anecdotal) examples: babies, deaf people, people with injuries and other diseases of the brain. And this pattern is repeated throughout the book. Also, that is most frustrating, numerous grammatical rules and structures are explained ad nauseam to illustrate whatever theory he is trying to push. You feel that author tries to literally hammer his ideas into it with all the available force of boring grammar rules.
I forgot to mention that this is an excellent sleeping aid! I manged to fell asleep on a busy subway a few times even missing my stop. Enjoy!

Ik wou al sinds geruime tijd iets van Steven Pinker lezen. Vooral z'n taalgerichte boeken sprongen er bovenuit. Aangezien dit een van de klassiekers in het wereldje is, was de keuze snel gemaakt. Ik heb echter wel voor deze heruitgave gekozen, omdat Pinker een kleine update eraan toegevoegd heeft.

Het is natuurlijk geen eenvoudige kost, maar Pinker heeft het toch zo toegankelijk mogelijk gemaakt. Het is geen droog, academisch werk - althans, het is niet op die manier geschreven -, wel wat losser, met hier en daar wat grappige verwoordingen en anekdotes.

Pinker beschrijft hoe taal ontstaat, welke invloeden er zijn, hoe het in elkaar zit (toch vooral wat het Engels betreft - je kunt het extrapoleren naar gelijkaardige talen qua techniciteit; je krijgt ook een les zinsontleding, m.i. een leuke opfrissing), hoe baby's ermee omgaan, hoe je met beperkte kennis toch zinnen kunt maken en je punt kunt maken of probeert te maken (vb. pidgin, creools, ...). Verder beschrijft hij hoe en waar (omstandigheden, situaties) taal gebruikt wordt, hoe spraaktechnologie erbij gekomen is, hoe je met taal kunt spelen, hoe de hersenen het mogelijk maken (en waarom andere dieren niet kunnen spreken zoals de mens, ook al leren we sommige soorten dat wel te doen: vogels, apen, honden, ...).

Maar dan komt er een moment waarop Pinker zich beter waant dan de rest en pedant, betweterig wordt; een moment waarin hij bijvoorbeeld bepaalde specialisten op hun plaats probeert te zetten door hun manier van denken aan te vallen. Wellicht heeft hij ergens gelijk, maar de manier waarop deed me toch de wenkbrauwen fronsen.

De extra's zijn wat korte info over z'n opvoeding, z'n studies, hoe dit boek tot stand is gekomen, z'n invloeden (o.a. Noam Chomsky), en hoe de wereld op vlak van taalonderzoek (incl. genetica, neurowetenschappen, e.d.) veranderd is sinds de eerste publicatie van het boek. Hier vertelt hij ook hoe het bepaalde personen en bevindingen vergaan is in de loop der jaren.

Pinkers pedant gedrag terzijde, is 'The Language Instinct' toch wel een aanrader voor wie zich voor taal, taalkundigheid, e.d. interesseert. Pinker gaat breed, behandelt verschillende aspecten zodat je eigen beeld over taal groter, diverser wordt dan voorheen.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature staat op m'n wishlist, en gezien dit boek enigszins gerelateerd is aan 'The Language Instinct', wordt dit m'n volgende Pinker. Op termijn.

Main takeaways:
- Language is an innate skill possessed by humans and not acquired artificially through teaching like writing, programming, etc.
- Although innate, the skill can be automatically learnt only during the critical period of up to 6 years of age. Beyond this age, it has to be artificially acquired like a second language.
- Just one generation of children brought up by adults who speak a "pidgin" (a language lacking grammar and consisting of mere words from a number of different languages) is enough to create a "creole" (a grammatically rich language which borrows the pidgin vocabulary)
- All languages share a Universal Grammar (which is the part of language learning that's probably innate in humans). Each language follows the super-rules of this grammar but has its own values for the variable parameters depending on various cultural and environmental factors.
- Rules of grammar are only useful as long as they help resolve ambiguity and enable effective communication among humans. Rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "use whom instead of who" are bookishly enforced and serve no practical purpose.
- "English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."

I so so so wanted to like this book. I took one linguistics class and did a number of rhetoric classes so I thought that I would find this book accessible. I did not. I recognize the Chomsky language trees. I did see why the trees were so important to discuss top and bottom sentences and to prove how all humans are hardwired for language so that babies simply learn if their family speaks top or bottom sentences and SVO or some other construction. Yet all human languaget is obviously human. I get that. I wonder why Pinker wrote such a detailed argument, so detailed that my attention derailed, and I cannot read one more page of this book.
So why 3 stars when I seem to hate this book? I do not hate the book. I am frustrated by the details. I plan to retern to this book at a later date and to read one chapter at a time and then put the book away for a month and then repeat the process until I complete the book. I am simply on information overload. I will re-read this book and fully intend to rate it 4 or 5 stars.

(Based on the highly abridged audiobook.)

Pinker's lively popularization of Chomskyan linguistics and cutting edge cognitive science elucidates the best available evidence for a "universal grammar" of the mind. (It is useful to remember, however, that this book was written in the 1990s.)

Pinker's attempts at psycholinguistic theory are often quite amateurish and crude, since he clearly doesn't have in-depth knowledge of the field. His computational model of the mind, as well as his belief in the "language of thinking" (what he calls "mentalese"), are somewhat mechanistic and lacking in data.

But the overall project is a vital one, and the ease with which Pinker employs quotations from popular culture and Shakespeare to spice up his survey of the sciences is very "edutaining." The importance of making science fun is overlooked by many thinkers, who think that dry facts should do the talking. But how can we hope to convince people if we cannot even keep them awake?

When a brilliant mind manages to synthesize decades of research, and make the reader enjoy the process of learning, the result is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Second reading April 2012.

I've been working on this one all semester. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to read a book about heavy-duty linguistics while also taking two classes about heavy-duty linguistics. Some parts of this book were a little thick to get through (and my BA is in Linguistics). I remember it being more accessible the first time I read it and I wonder if I somehow got my hands on an expanded edition (I read it on my Kindle this time so it would be hard to tell if it's thicker than the edition I read before).

Still a great book, though. Spend a whole class on each chapter and it just about adds up to my undergraduate degree.