The "first rockstar in psychology", Professor Steven Pinker, tries to explain his theory about how
language works to the layman. How? By shedding light on the way
languages are born and evolve, and the way language is processed by our brain.
His theoretical perspective partially relies on that proposed by the world-known linguist Noam Chomsky, according to whom all the human beings are innately provided with a "universal
grammar" that allows them to adquire natural languages in an impressively fast way.
Pinker tries to defend the thesis of the Universal Grammar by addressing several key issues in
linguistics, such as the question of "the poverty of the stimulus": the quantity of language children are exposed to would be not sufficient to let them learn their mothertongue if they had not got inside themselves some innate structures allowing them to understand and reproduce the language they hear from the environment.In addition to this, Pinker claims, every known language in the world obeys to some general principle in the way it puts word together (i.e., its
syntax).
Language, according to this perspective, should be seen not as a social product, but as an innate faculty of our
mind.
Pinker sheds light on several common ideas about language ("what is wrong? what is right?"), often not scientific at all, and manages to explain in a clear style difficult concepts, drawing on an endless set of everyday-life and fun examples.
He shows in a plain and pleasantful way how language works, in all of its facets: how are sounds produced and perceived? How do we create new
words from the existing ones? How can words be put together?
Pinker goes on and comes up with a very strong hypothesis about the origin of the language faculty: it would be not only a mental innate structure, but a product of natural selection: he attemps indeed to trace a general scheme of how language could be "registered" in the DNA.
Language would be, as the title of the book says, an istinct of our cognitive system, and not only a collection of elements put together.
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