The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

  The question is rather odd, because it assumes that Darwin literally meant that organs must evolve in successively larger fractions (half, three quarters, and so on). Bates’ rhetorical question is like asking what it could conceivably mean for an organism to possess half a head or three quarters of an elbow. Darwin’s real claim, of course, is that organs evolve in successively more complex forms. Grammars of intermediate complexity are easy to imagine; they could have symbols with a narrower range, rules that are less reliably applied, modules with fewer rules, and so on. In a recent book Derek Bickerton answers Bates even more concretely. He gives the term “protolanguage” to chimp signing, pidgins, child language in the two-word stage, and the unsuccessful partial language acquired after the critical period by Genie and other wolf-children. Bickerton suggests that Homo erectus spoke in protolanguage. Obviously there is still a huge gulf between these relatively crude systems and the modern adult language instinct, and here Bickerton makes the jaw-dropping additional suggestion that a single mutation in a single woman, African Eve, simultaneously wired in syntax, resized and reshaped the skull, and reworked the vocal tract. But we can extend the first half of Bickerton’s argument without accepting the second half, which is reminiscent of hurricanes assembling jetliners. The languages of children, pidgin speakers, immigrants, tourists, aphasics, telegrams, and headlines show that there is a vast continuum of viable language systems varying in efficiency and expressive power, exactly what the theory of natural selection requires.

  A third problem is that each step in the evolution of a language instinct, up to and including the most recent ones, must enhance fitness. David Premack writes:

  I challenge the reader to reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or protohumans were hunting mastodons…. Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark: “Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack”?

  Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules, of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like. For discussions of that kind, syntactic classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

  I am reminded of a Yiddish expression, “What’s the matter, is the bride too beautiful?” The objection is a bit like saying that the cheetah is much faster than it has to be, or that the eagle does not need such good vision, or that the elephant’s trunk is an overly powerful device, absurdly so. But it is worth taking up the challenge.

  First, bear in mind that selection does not need great advantages. Given the vastness of time, tiny advantages will do. Imagine a mouse that was subjected to a minuscule selection pressure for increased size—say, a one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse’s descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.

  Second, if contemporary hunter-gatherers are any guide, our ancestors were not grunting cave men with little more to talk about than which mastodon to avoid. Hunter-gatherers are accomplished toolmakers and superb amateur biologists with detailed knowledge of the life cycles, ecology, and behavior of the plants and animals they depend on. Language would surely have been useful in anything resembling such a lifestyle. It is possible to imagine a superintelligent species whose isolated members cleverly negotiated their environment without communicating with one another, but what a waste! There is a fantastic payoff in trading hard-won knowledge with kin and friends, and language is obviously a major means of doing so.

  And grammatical devices designed for communicating precise information about time, space, objects, and who did what to whom are not like the proverbial thermonuclear fly-swatter. Recursion in particular is extremely useful; it is not, as Premack implies, confined to phrases with tortuous syntax. Without recursion you can’t say the man’s hat or I think he left. Recall that all you need for recursion is an ability to embed a noun phrase inside another noun phrase or a clause within a clause, which falls out of rules as simple as “NP det N PP” and “PP P NP.” With this ability a speaker can pick out an object to an arbitrarily fine level of precision. These abilities can make a big difference. It makes a difference whether a far-off region is reached by taking the trail that is in front of the large tree or the trail that the large tree is in front of. It makes a difference whether that region has animals that you can eat or animals that can eat you. It makes a difference whether it has fruit that is ripe or fruit that was ripe or fruit that will be ripe. It makes a difference whether you can get there if you walk for three days or whether you can get there and walk for three days.

  Third, people everywhere depend on cooperative efforts for survival, forming alliances by exchanging information and commitments. This too puts complex grammar to good use. It makes a difference whether you understand me as saving that if you give me some of your fruit I will share meat that I will get, or that you should give me some fruit because I shared meat that I got, or that if you don’t give me some fruit I will take back the meat that I got. And once again, recursion is far from being an absurdly powerful device. Recursion allows sentences like He knows that she thinks that he is flirting with Mary and other means of conveying gossip, an apparently universal human vice.

  But could these exchanges really produce the rococo complexity of human grammar? Perhaps. Evolution often produces spectacular abilities when adversaries get locked into an “arms race,” like the struggle between cheetahs and gazelles. Some anthropologists believe that human brain evolution was propelled more by a cognitive arms race among social competitors than by mastery of technology and the physical environment. After all, it doesn’t take that much brain power to master the ins and outs of a rock or to get the better of a berry. But outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one. In all cultures, social interactions are mediated by persuasion and argument. How a choice is framed plays a large role in determining which alternative people choose. Thus there could easily have been selection for any edge in the ability to frame an offer so that it appears to present maximal benefit and minimal cost to the negotiating partner, and in the ability to see through such attempts and to formulate attractive counterproposals.

  Finally, anthropologists have noted that tribal chiefs are often both gifted orators and highly polygynous—a splendid prod to any imagination that cannot conceive of how linguistic skills could make a Darwinian difference. I suspect that evolving humans lived in a world in which language was woven into the intrigues of politics, economics, technology, family, sex, and friendship that played key roles in individual reproductive success. They could no more live with a Me-Tarzan-you-Jane level of grammar than we could.

  The brouhaha raised by the uniqueness of language has many ironies. The spectacle of humans trying to ennoble animals by forcing them to mimic human forms of communication is one. The pains that have been taken to portray language as innate, complex, and useful but not a product of the one force in nature that can make innate complex useful things is another. Why should language be considered such a big deal? It has allowed humans to spread out over the planet and wreak large changes, but is that any more extraordinary than coral that build islands, earthworms that shape the landscape by building soil, or the photosynthesizing bacteria that first released corrosive oxygen into the atmosphere, an ecological catas
trophe of its time? Why should talking humans be considered any weirder than elephants, penguins, beavers, camels, rattlesnakes, hummingbirds, electric eels, leaf-mimicking insects, giant sequoias, Venus flytraps, echolocating bats, or deep-sea fish with lanterns growing out of their heads? Some of these creatures have traits unique to their species, others do not, depending only on the accidents of which of their relatives have become extinct. Darwin emphasized the genealogical connectedness of all living things, but evolution is descent with modification, and natural selection has shaped the raw materials of bodies and brains to fit them into countless differentiated niches. For Darwin, such is the “grandeur in this view of life”: “that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  The Language Mavens

  Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees’ nests are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys’ cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an “error”? Isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer, anyway?

  But for human language, most people think that the same pronouncements not only are meaningful but are cause for alarm. Johnny can’t construct a grammatical sentence. As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functional illiterates: misusing hopefully, confusing lie and lay, treating data as a singular noun, letting our participles dangle. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

  To a linguist or psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is “grammatical” is to find people who speak the language and ask them. So when people are accused of speaking “ungrammatically” in their own language, or of consistently violating a “rule,” there must be some different sense of “grammatical” and “rule” in the air. In fact, the pervasive belief that people do not know their own language is a nuisance in doing linguistic research. A linguist’s question to an informant about some form in his or her speech (say, whether the person uses sneaked or snuck) is often lobbed back with the ingenuous counterquestion “Gee, I better not take a chance; which is correct?”

  In this chapter I had better resolve this contradiction for you. Recall columnist Erma Bombeck, incredulous at the very idea of a grammar gene because her husband taught thirty-seven high school students who thought that “bummer” was a sentence. You, too, might be wondering: if language is as instinctive as spinning a web, if every three-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our brains, why is the English language in such a mess? Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts pen to paper?

  The contradiction begins in the fact that the words “rule,” “grammatical,” and “ungrammatical,” have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson. The rules people learn (or, more likely, fail to learn) in school are called prescriptive rules, prescribing how one “ought” to talk. Scientists studying language propose descriptive rules, describing how people do talk. They are completely different things, and there is a good reason that scientists focus on descriptive rules.

  To a scientist, the fundamental fact of human language is its sheer improbability. Most objects in the universe—lakes, rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars—cannot talk. Even in humans, the utterances in a language are an infinitesimal fraction of the noises people’s mouths are capable of making. I can arrange a combination of words that explains how octopuses make love or how to remove cherry stains; rearrange the words in even the most minor way, and the result is a sentence with a different meaning or, most likely of all, word salad. How are we to account for this miracle? What would it take to build a device that could duplicate human language?

  Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like “Don’t split infinitives” or “Never begin a sentence with because.” It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don’t split infinitives; they’re called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino-makers, and so on. Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences and define the infinitives and list the word because to begin with, the rules of Chapters 4 and 5. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples eat the boy or The child seems sleeping or Who did you meet John and? or the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words. So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  So there is no contradiction in saying that every normal person can speak grammatically (in the sense of systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just as there is no contradiction in saying that a taxi obeys the laws of physics but breaks the laws of Massachusetts. But this raises a question. Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about “correct English” for the rest of us. Who? There is no English Language Academy, and this is just as well; the purpose of the Académie Francaise is to amuse journalists from other countries with bitterly argued decisions that the French gaily ignore. Nor were there any Founding Fathers at some English Language Constitutional Conference at the beginning of time. The legislators of “correct English,” in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, conciseness, elegance, continuity, precision, stability, integrity, and expressive range. (Some of them go further and say that they are actually safeguarding the ability to think clearly and logically. This radical Whorfianism is common among language pundits, not surprisingly; who would settle for being a schoolmarm when one can be an upholder of rationality itself?) William Safire, who writes the weekly column “On Language” for The New York Time Magazine, calls himself a “language maven,” from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

  To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English at all periods, incuding Shakespeare and most of the mavens themselves, have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic n
or to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the “ignorant errors” these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

  The scandal of the language mavens began in the eighteenth century. London had become the political and financial center of England, and England had become the center of a powerful empire. The London dialect was suddenly an important world language. Scholars began to criticize it as they would any artistic or civil institution, in part to question the customs, hence authority, of court and aristocracy. Latin was still considered the language of enlightenment and learning (not to mention the language of a comparably vast empire), and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire. The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who desired education and self-improvement and who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English. These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces. Casting English grammar into the mold of Latin grammar made the books useful as a way of helping young students learn Latin. And as the competition became cutthroat, the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore. Most of the hobgoblins of a contemporary prescriptive grammar (don’t split infinitives, don’t end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these eighteenth-century fads.