The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

  Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not—whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. Julius Caesar could not have split an infinitive if he had wanted to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word like facere or dicere, a syntactic atom. English is a different kind of language. It is an “isolating” language, building sentences around many simple words instead of a few complicated ones. The infinitive is composed of two words—a complementizer, to, and a verb, like go. Words, by definition, are rearrangeable units, and there is no conceivable reason why an adverb should not come between them:

  Space—the final frontier…These are the voyages of the star-ship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

  To go boldly where no man has gone before? Beam me up, Scotty; there’s no intelligent life down here. As for outlawing sentences that end with a preposition (impossible in Latin for good reasons having to do with its case-marking system, reasons that are irrelevant in case-poor English)—as Winston Churchill would have said, it is a rule up with which we should not put.

  But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it. (I confess that this has deterred me from splitting some splitworthy infinitives.) Perhaps most importantly, since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.

  The concept of shibboleth (Hebrew for “torrent”) comes from the Bible:

  And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12:5–6)

  This is the kind of terror that has driven the prescriptive grammar market in the United States during the past century. Throughout the country people have spoken a dialect of English, some of whose features date to the early modern English period, that H. L. Mencken called The American Language. It had the misfortune of not becoming the standard of government and education, and large parts of the “grammar” curriculum in American schools have been dedicated to stigmatizing it as ungrammatical, sloppy speech. Familiar examples are aks a question, workin’, ain’t, I don’t see no birds, he don’t, them boys, we was, and past-tense forms like drug, seen, clumb, drownded, and growed. For ambitious adults who had been unable to complete school, there were full-page magazine ads for correspondence courses, containing lists of examples under screaming headlines like “DO YOU MAKE ANY OF THESE EMBARRASSING MISTAKES?”

  Frequently the language mavens claim that nonstandard American English is not just different but less sophisticated and logical. The case, they would have to admit, is hard to make for nonstandard irregular verbs like drag-drug (and even more so for regularizations like feeled and growed). After all, in “correct” English, Richard Lederer notes, “Today we speak, but first we spoke; some faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.” At first glance, the mavens would seem to have a better argument when it comes to the leveling of inflectional distinctions in He don’t and We was. But then, this has been the trend in Standard English for centuries. No one gets upset that we no longer distinguish the second person singular form of verbs, like sayest. And by this criterion it is the nonstandard dialects that are superior, because they provide their speakers with second person plural pronouns like y’all and youse, and Standard English does not.

  At this point, defenders of the standard are likely to pull out the notorious double negative, as in I can’t get no satisfaction. Logically speaking, the two negatives cancel each other out, they teach; Mr. Jagger is actually saying that he is satisfied. The song should be entitled “I Can’t Get Any Satisfaction.” But this reasoning is not satisfactory. Hundreds of languages require their speakers to use a negative element somewhere within the “scope,” as linguists call it, of a negated verb. The so-called double negative, far from being a corruption, was the norm in Chaucer’s Middle English, and negation in standard French—as in Je ne sais pas, where ne and pas are both negative—is a familiar contemporary example. Come to think of it, Standard English is really no different. What do any, even and at all mean in the following sentences?

  I didn’t buy any lottery tickets.

  I didn’t eat even a single French fry.

  I didn’t eat fried food at all today.

  Clearly, not much: you can’t use them alone, as the following strange sentences show:

  I bought any lottery tickets.

  I ate even a single French fry.

  I ate fried food at all today.

  What these words are doing is exactly what no is doing in nonstandard American English, such as in the equivalent I didn’t buy no lottery tickets—agreeing with the negated verb. The slim difference is that nonstandard English co-opted the word no as the agreement element, whereas Standard English co-opted the word any; aside from that, they are pretty much translations. And one more point has to be made. In the grammar of standard English, a double negative does not assert the corresponding affirmative. No one would dream of saying I can’t get no satisfaction out of the blue to boast that he easily attains contentment. There are circumstances in which one might use the construction to deny a preceding negation in the discourse, but denying a negation is not the same as asserting an affirmative, and even then one could probably only use it by putting heavy stress on the negative element, as in the following contrived example:

  As hard as I try not to be smug about the misfortunes of my adversaries, I must admit that I can’t get no satisfaction out of his tenure denial.

  So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead to confusion is pure pedantry.

  A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools of the trade for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today’s youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn’t care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:

  The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it’s sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, “Oh yeah, as if there was something in he world that I care less about.”

  Sometimes an alleged grammatical “error” is logical not only in the sense of “rational” but in the sense of respecting distinctions made by the formal logician. Consider this alleged barbarism, brought up by nearly every language maven:

  Everyone returned to their seats.

  Anyone who thinks a Yonex racquet has improved their game, raise your hand.

  If anyone calls, tell them I can’t come to the phone.

  Someone
dropped by but they didn’t say what they wanted.

  No one should have to sell their home to pay for medical care.

  He’s one of those guys who’s always patting themself on the back, [an actual quote from Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye]

  They explain: everyone means every one, a singular subject, which may not serve as the antecedent of a plural pronoun like them later in the sentence. “Everyone returned to his seat,” they insist. “If anyone calls, tell him I can’t come to the phone.”

  If you were the target of these lessons, at this point you might be getting a bit uncomfortable. Everyone returned to his seat makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission to be in the audience, and everyone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph. If there is a good chance that a caller may be female, it is odd to ask one’s roommate to tell him anything (even if you are not among the people who are concerned about “sexist language”). Such feelings of disquiet—a red flag to any serious linguist—are well founded in this case. The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:

  Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.

  Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

  The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an “antecedent” and a “pronoun” referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The same goes for the hypothetical caller: there may be one, there may be none, or the phone might ring off the hook with would-be suitors; all that matters is that every time there is a caller, if there is a caller, that caller, and not someone else, should be put off.

  On logical grounds, then, variables are not the same thing as the more familiar “referential” pronouns that trigger number agreement (he meaning some particular guy, they meaning some particular bunch of guys). Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy; a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable. Since these are not real referential pronouns but only homonyms of them, there is no reason that the vernacular decision to borrow they, their, them for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists’ recommendation of he, him, his. Indeed, they has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.

  Through the ages, language mavens have deplored the way English speakers convert nouns into verbs. The following verbs have all been denounced in this century:

  to caveat

  to nuance

  to dialogue

  to parent

  to input

  to access

  to showcase

  to intrigue

  to impact

  to host

  to chair

  to progress

  to contact

  As you can see, they range from varying degrees of awkwardness to the completely unexceptionable. In fact, easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English. I have estimated that about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns. Considering just the human body, you can head a committee, scalp the missionary, eye a babe, nose around the office, mouth the lyrics, gum the biscuit, begin teething, tongue each note on the flute, jaw at the referee, neck in the back seat, back a candidate, arm the militia, shoulder the burden, elbow your way in, hand him a toy, finger the culprit, knuckle under, thumb a ride, wrist it into the net, belly up to the bar, stomach someone’s complaints, rib your drinking buddies, knee the goalie, leg it across town, heel on command, foot the bill, toe the line, and several others that I cannot print in a family language book.

  What’s the problem? The concern seems to be that fuzzy-minded speakers are slowly eroding the distinction between nouns and verbs. But once again, the person in the street is not getting any respect. Remember a phenomenon we encountered in Chapter 5: the past tense of the baseball term to fly out is flied, not flew; similarly, we say ringed the city, not rang, and grandstanded, not grandstood. These are verbs that came from nouns (a pop fly, a ring around the city, a grandstand). Speakers are tacitly sensitive to this derivation. The reason they avoid irregular forms like flew out is that their mental dictionary entry for the baseball verb to fly is different from their mental dictionary entry for the ordinary verb to fly (what birds do). One is represented as a verb based on a noun root; the other, as a verb with a verb root. Only the verb root is allowed to have the irregular past-tense form flew, because only for verb roots does it make sense to have any past-tense form. The phenomenon shows that when people use a noun as a verb, they are making their mental dictionaries more sophisticated, not less so—it’s not that words are losing their identities as verbs versus nouns; rather, there are verbs, there are nouns, and there are verbs based on nouns, and people store each one with a different mental tag.

  The most remarkable aspect of the special status of verbs-from-nouns is that everyone unconsciously respects it. Remember from Chapter 5 that if you make up a new verb based on a noun, like someone’s name, it is always regular, even if the new verb sounds the same as an existing verb that is irregular. (For example, Mae Jemison, the beautiful black female astronaut, out-Sally-Rided Sally Ride, not out-Sally-Rode Sally Ride.) My research team has tried this test, using about twenty-five new verbs made out of nouns, on hundreds of people—college students, respondents to an ad we placed in a tabloid newspaper asking for volunteers without college education, school-age children, even four-year-olds. They all behave like good intuitive grammarians: they inflect verbs that come from nouns differently from plain old verbs.

  So is there anyone, anywhere, who does not grasp the principle? Yes—the language mavens. Look up broadcasted in Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer, and here is what you will find:

  If you think you have correctly forecasted the immediate future of English and have casted your lot with the permissivists, you may be receptive to broadcasted, at least in radio usage, as are some dictionaries. The rest of us, however, will decide that no matter how desirable it may be to convert all irregular verbs into regular ones, this cannot be done by ukase, nor can it be accomplished overnight. We shall continue to use broadcast as the past tense and participle, feeling that there is no reason for broadcasted other than one of analogy or consistency or logic, which the permissivists themselves so often scorn. Nor is this position inconsistent with our position on flied, the baseball term, which has a real reason for being. The fact—the inescapable fact—is that there are some irregular verbs.

  Bernstein’s “real reason” for flied is that it has a specialized meaning in baseball, but that is the wrong reason; see a bet, cut a deal, and take the count all have specialized meanings, but they get to keep their irregular pasts saw, cut, and took, rather than switching to seed, cutted, taked. No, the real reason is that to fly out means to hit a fly, and a fly is a noun. And the reason that people say broadcasted is the same: not that they want to convert all irregular verbs into regular ones overnight, but that they mentally analyze the verb to broadcasts “to make a broadcast,” that is, as coming from the much more common noun a broadcast. (The original meaning of the verb, “to disperse seeds,” is now
obscure except among gardeners.) As a verb based on a noun, to broadcast is not eligible to have its own idiosyncratic past-tense form, so nonmavens sensibly apply the “add -ed” rule.

  I am obliged to discuss one more example: the much-vilified hopefully. A sentence like Hopefully, the treaty will pass is said to be a grave error. The adverb hopefully comes from the adjective hopeful, meaning “in a manner of hope.” Therefore, the mavens say, it should be used only when the sentence refers to a person who is doing something in a hopeful manner. If it is the writer or reader who is hopeful, one should say It is hoped that the treaty will pass, or If hopes are realized, the treaty will pass, or I hope that the treaty will pass.

  Now consider the following:

  1. It is simply not true that an English adverb must indicate the manner in which the actor performs the action. Adverbs come in two kinds: “verb phrase” adverbs like carefully, which do refer to the actor, and “sentence” adverbs like frankly, which indicate the attitude of the speaker toward the content of the sentence. Other examples of sentence adverbs include:

  accordingly

  admittedly

  alarmingly

  amazingly

  basically

  bluntly

  candidly

  confidentially

  curiously

  generally

  happily

  honestly

  ideally

  incidentally

  intriguingly

  mercifully