The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (73 page)
Read The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
One reason innate commonalities and innate differences are so easy to confuse is that behavior geneticists (the scientists who study inherited deficits, identical and fraternal twins, adopted and biological children, and so on) have usurped the word “heritable” as a technical term referring to the proportion of
variation
in some trait that correlates with genetic differences within a species. This sense is different from the everyday term “inherited” (or genetic), which refers to traits whose inherent structure or organization comes from information in the genes. Something can be ordinarily inherited but show zero heritability, like number of legs at birth or the basic structure of the mind. Conversely, something can be not inherited but have 100% heritability. Imagine a society where all and only the red-haired people were made priests. Priesthood would be highly “heritable,” though of course not inherited in any biologically meaningful sense. For this reason, people are bound to be confused by claims like “Intelligence is 70% heritable,” especially when the newsmagazines report them in the same breath (as they inevitably do, alas) with research in cognitive science on the basic workings of the mind.
All claims about a language instinct and other mental modules are claims about the commonalities among all normal people. They have virtually nothing to do with possible genetic differences between people. One reason is that, to a scientist interested in how complex biological systems work, differences between individuals are so
boring!
Imagine what a dreary science of language we would have if instead of trying to figure out how people put words together to express their thoughts, researchers have begun by developing a Language Quotient (LQ) scale, and busied themselves by measuring thousands of people’s relative language skills. It would be like asking how lungs work and being told that some people have better lungs than others, or asking how compact disks reproduce sound and being given a consumer magazine that ranked them instead of an explanation of digital sampling and lasers.
But emphasizing commonalities is not just a matter of scientific taste. The design of any adaptive biological system—the explanation of how it works—is almost certain to be uniform across individuals in a sexually reproducing species, because sexual recombination would fatally scramble the blueprints for qualitatively different designs. There is, to be sure, a great deal of genetic diversity among individuals; each person is biochemically unique. But natural selection is a process that feeds on that variation, and (aside from functionally equivalent varieties of molecules) when natural selection creates adaptive designs, it does so by using the variation up: the variant genes that specify more poorly designed organs disappear when their owners starve, get eaten, or die mateless. To the extent that mental modules are complex products of natural selection, genetic variation will be limited to quantitative variations, not differences in basic design. Genetic differences among people, no matter how fascinating they are to us in love, biography, personnel, gossip, and politics, are of minor interest to us when we appreciate what makes minds intelligent at all.
Similarly, an interest in mind design puts possible innate differences between sexes (as a psycholinguist I refuse to call them “genders”) and races in a new light. With the exception of the maleness-determining gene on the Y-chromosome, every functioning gene in a man’s body is also found in a woman’s and vice versa. The maleness gene is a developmental switch that can activate some suites of genes and deactivate others, but the same blueprints are in both kinds of bodies, and the default condition is identity of design. There is some evidence that the sexes depart from this default in the case of the psychology of reproduction and the adaptive problems directly and indirectly related to it, which is not surprising; it seems unlikely that peripherals as different as the male and female reproductive systems would come with the same software. But the sexes face essentially similar demands for most of the rest of cognition, including language, and I would be surprised if there were differences in design between them.
Race and ethnicity are the most minor differences of all. The human geneticists Walter Bodmer and Luca Cavalli-Sforza have noted a paradox about race. Among laypeople, race is lamentably salient, but for biologists it is virtually invisible. Eighty-five percent of human genetic variation consists of the differences between one person and another within the same ethnic group, tribe, or nation. Another eight percent is between ethnic groups, and a mere seven percent is between “races.” In other words, the genetic difference between, say, two randomly picked Swedes is about twelves times as large as the genetic difference between the average of Swedes and the average of Apaches or Warlpiris. Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza suggests that the illusion is the result of an unfortunate coincidence. Many of the systematic differences among races are adaptations to climate: melanin protects skin against the tropical sun, eyelid folds insulate eyes from dry cold and snow. But the skin, the part of the body seen by the weather, is also the part of the body seen by other people. Race is, quite literally, skin-deep, but to the extent that perceivers generalize from external to internal differences, nature has duped them into thinking that race is important. The X-ray vision of the molecular geneticist reveals the unity of our species.
And so does the X-ray vision of the cognitive scientist. “Not speaking the same language” is a virtual synonym for incommensurability, but to a psycholinguist, it is a superficial difference. Knowing about the ubiquity of complex language across individuals and cultures and the single mental design underlying them all, no speech seems foreign to me, even when I cannot understand a word. The banter among New Guinean highlanders in the film of their first contact with the rest of the world, the motions of a sign language interpreter, the prattle of little girls in a Tokyo playground—I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.
1.
An Instinct to Acquire an Art
Amorous octopuses: adapted from Wallace, 1980. Cherry stains:
Parade
magazine, April 5, 1992, p. 16.
All My Children:
adapted from
Soap Opera Digest
, March 30, 1993.Horse graveyard: Lambert & The Diagram Group, 1987. Megafauna extinctions: Martin & Klein, 1984.
Cognitive science: Gardner, 1985; Posner, 1989; Osherson & Lasnik, 1990; Osherson, Kosslyn, & Hollerbach, 1990; Osherson & Smith, 1990.
Instinct to acquire an art: Darwin, 1874, pp. 101–102.
The
why
of instinctive acts: James, 1892/1920, p. 394.Chomsky: Chomsky, 1959, 1965, 1975, 1980a, 1988, 1991; Kasher, 1991.
Chomsky on mental organs: Chomsky, 1975, pp. 9–11.
Top ten list: from
Arts and Humanities Citation Index;
Kim Vandiver, Chairman of the Faculty, MIT, citation for Noam Chomsky’s Killian Faculty Achievement Award, MIT, March 1992.Standard Social Science Model: Brown, 1991; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Degler, 1991. Challenging Chomsky: Harman, 1974; Searle, 1971; Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980; commentators in Chomsky, 1980b; Modgil & Modgil, 1987; Botha, 1989; Harris, 1993. Putnam on Chomsky: Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 287.
2.
Chatterboxes
First contact: Connolly & Anderson, 1987.
Language is universal: Murdoch, 1975; Brown, 1991.
No primitive languages: Sapir, 1921; Voegelin & Voegelin, 1977. Plato and swineherds: Sapir, 1921, p. 219.
Bantu syntax: Bresnan & Moshi, 1988; Bresnan, 1990. Cherokee pronouns: Holmes & Smith, 1977.
Logic of nonstandard English: Labov, 1969.
Putnam on general multipurpose learning strategies: Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980; Putnam, 1971; see also Bates, Thal, & Marchman, 1991.
Creoles: Holm, 1988; Bickerton, 1981, 1984.
Sign language: Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Wilbur, 1979.
Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense and Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense: Kegl & Lopez, 1990; Kegal & Iwata, 1989.
Children acquiring ASL: Petitto, 1988. Adults acquiring language (signed and spoken): Newport, 1990.
Simon: Singleton & Newport, 1993. Sign languages as creoles: Woodward, 1978; Fischer, 1978. Unlearnability of artificial sign systems: Supalla, 1986.
Aunt Mae: Heath, 1983, p. 84.
Structure dependence: Chomsky, 1975.
Children, Chomsky, and Jabba: Crain & Nakayama, 1986.
Universal auxiliaries: Steele et al., 1981. Language universals: Greenberg, 1963; Comrie, 1981; Shopen, 1985. Fluent backwards talkers: Cowan, Braine, & Leavitt, 1985.
Language development: Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1989; Ingram, 1989.
Sarah masters agreement: Brown, 1973. Examples are from a computer search of Sarah’s transcripts in the Child Language Data Exchange System; MacWhinney, 1991.
Children’s creative errors (
be’s, gots, do’s
): Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen, & Xu, 1992.Recovered aphasic: Gardner, 1974, p. 402. Permanent aphasic: Gardner, 1974, pp. 60–61.
Language mutants: Gopnik, 1990a, b; Gopnik & Crago, 1991; Gopnik, 1993.
Blatherers: Cromer, 1991.
More blatherers: Curtiss, 1989.
Williams syndrome: Bellugi et al., 1991, 1992.
3.
Mentalese
Newspeak: Orwell, 1949, pp. 246–247, 255.
Language and animal rights: Singer, 1992. General Semantics: Korzybski, 1933; Hayakawa, 1964; Murphy, 1992.
Sapir: Sapir, 1921. Whorf: Carroll, 1956.
Sapir: Sapir, 1921. Boas school: Degler, 1991; Brown, 1991. Whorf: Carroll, 1956.
Early Whorf critics: Lenneberg, 1953; Brown, 1958.
Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache: quoted in Brown, 1958, p. 232; see also Espy, 1989, p. 100.
Color lexicons: Crystal, 1987, p. 106.
Color vision: Hubel, 1988.
Color universals: Berlin & Kay, 1969. New Guineans learn red: Heider, 1972.
Timeless Hopi: Carroll, 1956, p. 57. Also pp. 55, 64, 140, 146, 153, 216–17.
Hopi prayer hour: Malotki, 1983, p. 1.
Hopi time: Brown, 1991; Malotki, 1983.
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax: Martin, 1986; Pullum, 1991.
Pullum on Eskimos: Pullum, 1991, pp. 162, 165–166. “Polysynthetic perversity” is an in-joke, from the linguist’s classification of Eskimo languages as “polysynthetic”; compare Freud’s “polymorphous perversity.”
Whorf in the lab: Cromer, 1991b; Kay & Kempton, 1984.
Subjunctives and the Chinese mind: Bloom, 1981, 1984; Au, 1983, 1984; Liu, 1985; Takano, 1989.
A man without words: Schaller, 1991.
Baby thoughts: Spelke et al., 1992. Baby arithmetic: Wynn, 1992.
Animal thinking: Gallistel, 1992. Monkey friends and relations: Cheney & Seyfarth, 1992.
Visual thinkers: Shepard, 1978; Shepard & Cooper, 1982. Einstein: Kosslyn, 1983.
Mind’s eye: Shepard & Cooper, 1982; Kosslyn, 1983; Pinker, 1985.
Representational theory of mind: in Haugeland, 1981, articles by Haugeland, Newell & Simon, Pylyshyn, Dennett, Marr, Searle, Putnam, and Fodor; in Pinker and Mehler, 1988, articles by Fodor & Pylyshyn and Pinker & Prince; Jackendoff, 1987.
English versus mentalese: Fodor, 1975; McDermott, 1981.
Headlines: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.
An example of mentalese: Jackendoff, 1987; Pinker, 1989.
4.
How Language Works
Arbitrary sound-meaning relation: Saussure, 1916/1959.
Infinite use of finite media: Humboldt, 1836/1972.
Discrete combinatorial systems: Chomsky, 1991; Abler, 1989; Studdert-Kennedy, 1990.
Discrete inheritance and evolution: Dawkins, 1986.
110-word Shavian sentence: example from Jacques Barzun; cited in Bolinger, 1980.
Faulker example (with modifications): Espy, 1989.
Sentences commenting on their own ungrammaticality: David Moser, cited in Hofstadter, 1985.
Nineteenth-century nonsense: Hofstadter, 1985.
Sleeping esophagus: Twain, “Double-Barreled Detective Story.” Example from Lederer, 1990.
Pobbles: Edward Lear, “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Jabber-wocky: Carroll, 1871/1981. Colorless green ideas: Chomsky, 1957.
Automated news story: Frayn, 1965. Example from Miller, 1967.
Gobbledygook generators: Brandreth, 1980; Bolinger, 1980;
Spy
magazine, January 1993.Approximations to English: Miller & Selfridge, 1950.
Finite-state devices and their problems: Chomsky, 1957; Miller & Chomsky, 1963; Miller, 1967.
TV Guide
example from Gleitman, 1981.Cook with round bottom: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980; Lederer, 1987.
Impenetrable Chomsky: Chomsky, 1986, p. 79. Textbooks on modern grammatical theory: Friedin, 1992; Radford, 1988; Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986.
Sex between parked cars: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.
X-bar syntax: Jackendoff, 1977; Kornai & Pullum, 1990.
Word-order correlations: Greenberg, 1963; Dryer, 1992.
Verbs’ demands: Grimshaw, 1990; Pinker, 1989.
Blinkenlights: Raymond, 1991.
Deep structure: Chomsky, 1965, 1988. Chomsky on doing without d-structure: Chomsky, 1991. Chomsky still believes that there are several phrase structures underlying a sentence; he simply wants to eliminate the idea that there is a special one called d-structure, a single framework defined for the entire sentence into which the verbs are then plugged. The suggested replacement is to have each verb come with a chunk of phrase structure preinstalled; the sentence is assembled by snapping together the various chunks.
5.
Words, Words, Words
Grammatical Man: Campbell, 1982. Chomsky in
Rolling Stone:
issue 631, May 28, 1992, p. 42. The Whore of Mensa: Allen, 1983.Bantu verbs: Bresnan & Moshi, 1988; Wald, 1990.
Part-Vulcans and other novel forms: Sproat, 1992.
Word-building machinery: Aronoff, 1976; Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; Di Sciullo & Williams, 1987; Kiparsky, 1982; Selkirk, 1982; Sproat, 1992; Williams, 1981. The
anti-missile missile
example is from Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.Inflectional rules as linguistic fruit flies: Pinker & Prince, 1988, 1992; Pinker, 1991.
People versus artificial neural networks: Prasada & Pinker, 1993; Sproat, 1992; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986.
Man sold as pet fish: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.
Heads of words: Williams, 1981; Selkirk, 1982.
Hackitude: Raymond, 1991.
Irregular verbs: Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; Kiparsky, 1982; Pinker & Prince, 1988, 1992; Pinker, 1991; Mencken, 1936. Irregular doggerel: author unknown, from Espy, 1975.
Dizzy Dean: Staten, 1992; Espy, 1975.
Irregularity and young minds: Yourcenar, 1961; quotation from Michael Maratsos.
Flying out: Kiparsky, 1982; Kim, Pinker, Prince, & Prasada, 1991; Kim, Marcus, Pinker, Hollander, & Coppola, in press; Pinker & Prince, 1992; Marcus, Clahsen, Brinkmann, Wiese, Woest, and Pinker, 1993.
Walkmans
versus
Walkmen: Newsweek
, August 7, 1989, p. 68.Mice-eaters: Kiparsky, 1982; Gordon, 1986.
Morphological products, syntactic atoms, and listemes: Di Sciullo and Williams, 1987.
Shakespeare’s vocabulary: Bryson, 1990; Ku
era, 1992. Shakespeare used about 30,000 different word forms, but many of these were inflected variants of a single word, like
angel
and
angels
or
laugh
and
laughed
. Applying statistics from contemporary English, one would get an estimate of about 18,000 word types, but this must be adjusted downward to about 15,000 because Shakespeare used more inflections than we do; for example, he used both -
eth
and -
s
.Counting words: Miller, 1977, 1991; Carey, 1978; Lorge & Chall, 1963.
Typical vocabulary size: Miller, 1991.
Word as arbitrary symbol: Saussure, 1916/1959; Hurford, 1989.
“You” and “me” in ASL: Petitto, 1988.
“Gavagai!”: Quine, 1960.
Categories: Rosch, 1978; Anderson, 1990.
Babies and objects: Spelke et al., 1992; Baillargeon, in press.
Children learning words: Markman, 1989.
Children, words, and kinds: Markman, 1989; Keil, 1989; Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1989, 1994. Sibbing: Brown, 1957; Gleitman, 1990.
6.
The Sounds of Silence
Sine-wave speech: Remez et al., 1981.
“Duplex” perception of speech components: Liberman & Mattingly, 1989.
McGurk effect: McGurk & MacDonald, 1976.
Speech segmentation: Cole & Jakimik, 1980.
Oronyms: Brandreth, 1980.
Pullet surprises: Lederer, 1987; Brandreth, 1980;
LINGUIST
electronic bulletin board, 1992.Smeared phonemes: Liberman et al., 1967.
Rate of speech perception: Miller, 1967; Liberman et al., 1967; Cole & Jakimik, 1980.
DragonDictate: Bamberg & Mandel, 1991.
Vocal tract: Crystal, 1987; Lieberman, 1984; Denes & Pinson, 1973; Miller, 1991; Green, 1976; Halle, 1990.
Phonetic symbolism: Brown, 1958.
Fiddle-faddle, flim-flam:
Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.Razzle-dazzle, rub-a-dub-dub:
Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.Speech gestures and distinctive features: Halle, 1983, 1990.
Speech sounds across the world: Halle, 1990; Crystal, 1987.
Speaking in tongues: Thomason, 1984; Samarin, 1972.
“Giacche Enne Binnestaucche”: Espy, 1975.
Syllables and feet: Kaye, 1989; Jackendoff, 1987.
Phonological rules: Kenstowicz & Kisseberth, 1979; Kaye, 1989; Halle, 1990; Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991.
Phonology with tiers: Kaye, 1989.
Shaw: Preface to
Pygmalion
. Slurvian: Lederer, 1987.American pronunciation: Cassidy, 1985. Teachers with accents:
Boston Globe
, July 10, 1992.Speaker versus hearer: Bolinger, 1980; Liberman & Mattingly, 1989; Pinker & Bloom, 1990.
Quine on redundancy: Quine, 1987.
Graceful motion: Jordan & Rosenbaum, 1989.
Why speech recognition is hard: Liberman et al., 1967; Mattingly & Studdert-Kennedy, 1991; Lieberman, 1984; Bamberg & Mandel, 1991; Cole & Jakimik, 1980.
Nonsense in noise: Miller, 1967. Phonemic restoration effect: Warren, 1970.
Problems with top-down perception: Fodor, 1983.
Mondegreens:
LINGUIST
electronic bulletin board, 1992.HEARSAY
system: Lesser et al., 1975.DragonDictate: Bamberg & Mandel, 1991.
Spelling poem: quoted in C. Chomsky, 1970.
Shaw: from Crystal, 1987, p. 216.
Written versus spoken language: Liberman et al., 1967; Miller, 1991.
Writing systems: Crystal, 1987; Miller, 1991; Logan, 1986.
Two tragedies in life: from
Man and Superman
.Rationality of English orthography: Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; C. Chomsky, 1970.
Twain on foreigners: from
The Innocents Abroad
.
