Book Analysis Essay on The Language Instinct

Introduction

Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language rejuvenated the debate about how language comes about, whether people learn language or it is an innate characteristic of human beings. According to Pinker, the composition and complexity of language exist in the genetic heredity of people and language is not learned (language is an instinct). He explains in the book that language is a skill that grows naturally in a newborn without deliberate interventions or official set-ups (Pinker, 2003). He further emphasizes that the quality of language is the same in everybody, that it is installed without the backing of logic, and that language is unique from all other human abilities. This paper dives into Pinker's claims and considers the views of supporters and critics while also offering a personal opinion on these claims.

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Pinker offers a persuasive and organized break down of how he believes language develops. The language abilities of a baby are clear from birth. He suggests that there is a nervous system specifically dedicated and evolved to control linguistic skills. It is because of this that he says there are stone-age communities, but there exists nothing like a stone age language. He goes on to say that language is an evolutionary tool that developed to solve the communication problem among humans. He disagrees with some philosophical generalizations that the quality of language is declining and that some people have poor language.

His first evidence is from the ubiquity of language. But he also notes that many other things are ubiquitous but not innate. To prove that language is innate, Pinker emphasizes that language is important in all human activities, including teaching, negotiation, love, preparation of food and shelter, etc. It is this necessity that led to its evolution, from which point it rapidly spread to other communities. To augment this point, he describes how one generation of children to another invent their language. When slaves were mixed with other slaves from different ethnicities, the urge to communicate (the intrinsic impetus for language) led them to develop word strings called pidgins (Berwick & Chomsky, 2017). When children interacted with a pidgin as their first language, they invented filler words to make the strings understandable and complete, forming a new language called a creole.

Pidgins also develop among the deaf, and that is why each community of deaf people have an almost unique sign language. Sign language is not learning and is not a creation of teachers or anyone, but is an agreement among deaf people in their innate search for a language. His other major claim is that all humans are born with an internal language that takes their ideas called mentalese. It is mentalese that provokes people to find a language to express themselves.

Steven's ideas are convincing, but not all his readers agree with him. In 2005, Geoffrey Sampson penned a critical rebuttal titled The "Language Instinct" Debate. Sampson's position is that children develop language through trial and error that relies on their interaction with the environment they are born in, acting together with other human abilities (Sampson & Postal, 2005). Further, he states that children only need to be exposed to a language for a considerable time to learn it. He picks an issue with one set of evidence form Pinker, where a multi-generation family with average intelligence seemed to all have language challenges. Sampson's point is that the weak IQ in the family also affected other characteristics, including formal learning; thus, this could not prove that language is innate.

Another critical dispute Sampson had concerned headless words like sabre-tooth. Pinker claims that instinctively, people will say sabre-tooths and not sabre-teeth because they learn from an early age that headless compounds have regular plurals. However, Sampson found many examples of people who say pink-feet as the plural form. This down-scores Pinker's argument.

Another author, Terrence W. Deacon, in his book The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, diverges from both Pinker and Sampson's opinions. Terrence poses that language is an adaptive characteristic and is automatically evolved. The development of language involves linkages between the learning of signs, challenges in neuron processing, and social interaction mechanisms (Deacon, 1998). He further postures that the progressive mastery of complex complete sentences is a result of specialization rather than genetic prompting or environment. He disagrees with Pinker, saying that language is extensively linked to other cognitive functions and has a complexity no other human trait has. This connection, according to Deacon, shows that language is a system of adaptations.

Overall, I agree with Pinker's ideas. His case is well though-out, organized, and every point makes complete sense. Natural human abilities are best learned from children because their lifestyles and thoughts are not yet corrupted by the environment (Vyv, 2019). As Pinker delved into the language adaptation and development in children, it is indisputably convincing that language must be controlled by a set of genes. Just like reproduction ad other instincts like eating, such a complex process like language cannot be spontaneous.

References

Berwick, R. C., & Chomsky, N. (2017). Why only us: Language and evolution.

Deacon, T. W. (1998). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain.

Pinker, S. (2003). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.

Sampson, G., & Postal, P. M. (2005). The 'language instinct' debate. New York: Continuum.

Vyv, E. (2019). Is Language an Instinct?. Retrieved 25 November 2019, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/language-in-the-mind/201412/is-language-instinct