The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Philosophy, Psychology, Language
ISBN: 9780140175295
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 1995-05-15T04:34:38+00:00

THE L A N G U A G E I N S T I N C T

But these functional explanations are often tenuous, and for many universals they do not work at all. For example, Greenberg noted that if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence), then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the stem than the inflectional ones. In Chapter 5 we saw this principle in English in the difference between the grammatical Darwinisms and the ungrammatical Darwinsism. It is hard to think of how this law could be a consequence of any universal principle of thought or memory: why would the concept of two ideologies based on one Darwin be thinkable, but the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus) not be thinkable (unless one reasons in a circle and declares that the mind must find -ism to be more cognitively basic than the plural, because that's the order we see in language)? And remember Peter Gordon's experiments showing that children say mice-eater but never rats-eater, despite the conceptual similarity of rats and mice and despite the absence of either kind of compound in parents' speech. His results corroborate the suggestion that this particular universal is caused by the way that morphological rules are computed in the brain, with inflection applying to the products of derivation but not vice versa. In any case, Greenbergisms are not the best place to look for a neurologically given Universal Grammar that existed before Babel. It is the organization of grammar as a whole, not some laundry list of facts, that we should be looking at. Arguing about the possible causes of something like SVO order misses the forest for the trees. What is most striking of all is that we can look at a randomly picked language and find things that can sensibly be called subjects, objects, and verbs to begin with. After all, if we were asked to look for the order of subject, object, and verb in musical notation, or in the computer programming language F O R T R A N , or in Morse code, or in arithmetic, we would protest that the very idea is nonsensical. It would be like assembling a representative collection of the world's cultures from the six continents and trying to survey the colors of their hockey team jerseys or the form of their harakiri rituals. We should be impressed, first and foremost, that research on universals of grammar is even possible!

When linguists claim to find the same kinds of linguistic gadgets in language after language, it is not just because they expect languages The Tower of Babel

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to have subjects and so they label as a "subject" the first kind of phrase they see that resembles an English subject. Rather, if a linguist examining a language for the first time calls a phrase a

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