The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

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  Glossary

  accusative. The case of the object of a verb: I saw HIM (not HE).

  active. See voice.

  adjective. One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a property or state: a HOT tin roof; He is AFRAID of his mother.

  adjunct. A phrase that comments on or adds parenthetical information to a concept (as opposed to an argument): a man FROM CINCINNATI; I cut the bread WITH A KNIFE, I have used the word modifier instead.

  adverb. One of the minor syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to the manner or time of an action: tread SOFTLY; BOLDLY go; He will leave SOON.

  affix. A prefix or suffix.

  agreement. The process in which a word in a sentence is altered depending on a property of some other word in the sentence; typically, the verb being altered to match the number, person, and gender of its subject or object: He SMELLS (not SMELL) versus They SMELL (not SMELLS).

  AI. Artificial Intelligence, the attempt to program computers to carry out intelligent, humanlike tasks such as learning, reasoning, recognizing objects, understanding speech and sentences, and moving arms and legs.

  algorithm. An explicit, step-by-step program or set of instructions for getting the solution to some problem: “To calculate a 15% tip, take the sales tax and multiply by three.”

  aphasia. The loss or impairment of language abilities following brain damage.

  argument. One of the participants defining a state, event, or relationship: president of THE UNITED STATES; DICK gave THE DIAMOND to LIZ; the sum of THREE and FOUR. I have used the term role-player instead.

  article. One of the minor syntactic categories, including the words a and the. Usually subsumed in the category determiner in contemporary theories of grammar.

  ASL. American Sign Language, the primary sign language of the deaf in the United States.

  aspect. The way an event is spread out over time: whether it is instantaneous (swat a fly), continuous (run around all day), terminating (draw a circle), habitual (mows the grass every Sunday), or a timeless state (knows how to swim). In English, aspect is involved in the inflectional distinction between He eats and He is eating, and between He ate, He was eating, and He has eaten.

  auxiliary. A special kind of verb used to express concepts related to the truth of the sentence, such as tense, negation, question/statement, necessary/possible: He MIGHT quibble; He WILL quibble; He HAS quibbled; He IS quibbling; He DOESN’T quibble; DOES he quibble?

  axon. the long fiber extending from a neuron that carries a signal to other neurons.

  behaviorism. A school of psychology, influential from the 1920s to the 1960s, that rejected the study of the mind as unscientific, and sought to explain the behavior of organisms (including humans) with laws of stimulus-response conditioning.

  bottom-up. Perceptual processing that relies on extracting information directly from the sensory signal (for example, the loudness, pitch, and frequency components of a sound wave), as opposed to top-down processing, which uses knowledge and expectancies to guess, predict, or fill in the perceived event or message.

  case. A set of affixes, positions, or word forms that a language uses to distinguish the different roles of the participants in some event or state. Cases typically correspond to the subject, object, indirect object, and the objects of various kinds of prepositions. In English, case is what distinguishes between I, he, she, we, they, which are used for subjects, and me, him, her, us, them, which are used for objects of verbs, objects of prepositions, and everywhere else.

  chain device. See finite-state device.

  chromosome. A long strand of DNA, containing thousands of genes, in a protective package. There are twenty-three chromosomes in a human sperm or egg; there are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (one from the mother, one from the father) in all other human cells.

  clause. A kind of phrase that is generally the same thing as a sentence, except that some kinds of clause can never occur on their own but only inside a bigger sentence: THE CAT IS ON THE MAT; John arranged FOR MARY TO GO; The spy WHO LOVED ME disappeared; He said THAT SHE LEFT.

  cognitive science. The study of intelligence (reasoning, perception, language, memory, control of
movement), embracing parts of several academic disciplines: experimental psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience.

  complement. A phrase that appears together with a verb, completing its meaning: She ate AN APPLE; It darted UNDER THE COUCH; I thought HE WAS DEAD.

  compound. A word formed by joining together other words: fruit-eater; superwoman; laser printer.

  concord. See agreement.

  conjunction. One of the minor syntactic categories, including and, or, and but; also, the entire phrase made by conjoining two words or phrases: Ernie and Bert; the naked and the dead.

  consonant. A phoneme produced with a blockage or constriction of the vocal tract.

  content words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and some prepositions, which typically express concepts particular to a given sentence, as opposed to function words (articles, conjunctions, auxiliaries, pronouns, and other prepositions), which are used to specify kinds of information, like tense or case, that are expressed in all or most sentences.

  copula. The verb to be when it is used to link a subject and a predicate: She WAS happy; Biff and Joe ARE fools; The cat IS on the mat.

  cortex. The thin surface of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, visible as gray matter, containing the bodies of neurons and their synapses with other neurons; where the neural computation takes place in the cerebral hemispheres. The rest of the cerebral hemispheres consists of white matter, bundles of axons that connect one part of the cortex with another.

  dative. A family of constructions typically used for giving or benefiting; She BAKED ME A CAKE; She BAKED A CAKE FOR ME; He GAVE HER A PARTRIDGE; He GAVE A PARTRIDGE TO HER. Also refers to the case of the beneficiary or recipient in this construction.

  deep structure (now d-structure). The tree, formed by phrase structure rules, into which words are plugged, in such a way as to satisfy the demands of the words regarding their neighboring phrases. Contrary to popular belief, not the same as Universal Grammar, the meaning of a sentence, or the abstract grammatical relationships underlying a sentence.

  derivational morphology. The component of grammar containing rules that create new words out of old ones: break + -able breakable; sing + -er singer; super + woman superwoman.

  determiner. One of the minor syntactic categories, comprising the articles and similar words: a, the, some, more, much, many.

  diphthong. A vowel consisting of two vowels pronounced in quick succession: bIte (pronounced “ba-eet”); loUd, mAke.

  discourse. A succession of related sentences, as in a conversation or text.

  dyslexia. Difficulty in reading or learning to read, which may be caused by brain damage, inherited factors, or unknown causes. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the habit of mirror-reversing letters.

  ellipsis. Omission of a phrase, usually one that was previously mentioned or can be inferred: Yes, I can (_____); Where are you going? (_____) To the store.

  empiricism. The approach to studying mind and behavior that emphasizes learning and environmental influence over innate structure; the claim that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. A second sense, not used in this book, is the approach to science that emphasizes experimentation and observation over theory.

  finite-state device. A device that can produce or recognize ordered sequences of behavior (like sentences), by selecting an output item (like a word) from a list, going to some other list and selecting an item from it, and so on, possibly looping back to earlier lists. I have used the term chaining device instead.

  function word. See content word.

  gender. A set of mutually exclusive kinds into which a language categorizes its nouns and pronouns. In many languages, the genders of pronouns correspond to the sexes (he versus she), and the genders of nouns are determined by their sounds (words ending in o are one gender, words ending in o are the other) or are simply put in two or three arbitrary lists. In other languages, gender can correspond to human versus nonhuman, animate versus inanimate, long versus round versus flat, and other distinctions.

  gene. (1) A stretch (or set of stretches) of DNA that carries the information necessary for building one kind of protein molecule. (2) A stretch of DNA that is long enough to survive intact across many generations of sexual recombination. (3) A stretch of DNA that, in comparison with alternative stretches that could sit at that location on the chromosome, contributes to the specification of some trait of the organism (e.g., “a gene for blue eyes”).

  generative grammar. See grammar.

  generative linguistics. The school of linguistics, associated with Noam Chomsky, that tries to discover the generative grammars of languages and the universal grammar underlying them.

  gerund. The noun formed out of a verb by adding -ing: his incessant HUMMING.

  grammar. A generative grammar is a set of rules that determines the form and meaning of words and sentences in a particular language as it is spoken in some community. A mental grammar is the hypothetical generative grammar stored unconsciously in a person’s brain. Neither should be confused with a prescriptive or stylistic grammar taught in school and explained in style manuals, the guidelines for how one “ought” to speak in a prestige or written dialect.

  gyrus. The outward, visible portion of a wrinkle of the brain. The plural is gyri.

  head. The single word in a phrase, or single morpheme in a word, that determines the meaning and properties of the whole: the MAN in the pinstriped suit; ruby-throated hummingBIRD.

  indirect object. In a dative construction with two objects, the first one, referring to the recipient or beneficiary: Bake ME a cake; Give THE DOG a bone.

  Indo-European. The group of language families that includes most of the languages of Europe, southwestern Asia, and northern India; thought to be descended from a language, Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken by a prehistoric people.

  induction. Uncertain or probabilistic inference (as opposed to deduction), especially a generalization from instances: “This raven is black; that raven is black; therefore all ravens are black.”

  infinitive. The generic form of a verb, lacking tense: He tried TO LEAVE; She may LEAVE.

  INFL. In post- 1970s Chomskyan theory, a syntactic category comprising the auxiliary elements and tense inflections, which serves as the head of the sentence.

  inflecting language. A language, like Latin, Russian, Warlpiri, or ASL, that relies heavily on inflectional morphology to convey information, as opposed to an isolating language like Chinese that leaves the forms of words alone and orders the words within phrases and sentences to convey information. English does both, but is considered more isolating than inflecting.

  inflectional morphology. The modification of the form of a word to fit its role in the sentence, usually by adding an inflection: I conquerED; I’m thinkING; Speed kills; two turtle doveS.

  intonation. The melody or pitch contour of speech.

  intransitive. A verb that may appear without an object: We DINED; She THOUGHT that he was single; as opposed to a transitive verb, that may appear with one: He DEVOURED the steak; I TOLD him to go.

  inversion. Flipping the position of the subject and the auxiliary: I am blue Am I blue?; What you will do What will you do?

  irregular. A word with an idiosyncratic inflected form instead of the one usually created by a rule of grammar: brought (not bringed); mice (not mouses); as opposed to regular words, which simply obey the rule (walk + -ed walked, rat + -s rats).

  isolating language. See inflecting language.

  larynx. The valve near the top of the windpipe, used to seal the lungs during exertion and to produce voiced sounds. Its parts include the vocal cords inside and the Adam’s apple in front.

  lexical entry. The information about a particular word (its sound, meaning, syntactic category, and special restrictions) stored in a person’s mental dictionary.

  lexicon. A dictionary, especially the “mental dictionary” consisting of a person’s intuitive knowledge of wor
ds and their meanings.

  linguist. A scholar or scientist who studies how languages work. Does not refer here to a person who speaks many languages.

  listeme. An uncommon but useful term corresponding to one of the senses of “word,” it refers to an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms, and idioms are listemes.

  main verb. A verb that is not the auxiliary: I might STUDY Latin; He is COMPLAINING again.

  Markov model. A finite-state device that, when faced with a choice between two or more lists, chooses among them according to prespecified probabilities (for example, a .7 chance of going to List A, a .3 chance of going to list B).

  mentalese. The hypothetical “language of thought,” or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meanings of words and sentences, are couched.

  modal. A kind of auxiliary: can, should, could, will, ought, might.

  modality. Whether a clause is a statement, question, negation, or imperative; another way of referring to some of the distinctions relevant to mood.

  modifier. See adjunct.

  mood. Whether a sentence is a statement (HE GOES), imperative (GO!), or subjunctive (It is important THAT HE GO).

  morphemes. The smallest meaningful pieces into which words can be cut: un-micro-wave-abil-ity.

  morphology. The component of grammar that builds words out of pieces (morphemes).

  movement. The principal kind of transformational rule in Chomsky’s theory, it moves a phrase from its customary position in deep structure to some other, unfilled position, leaving behind a “trace”: Do you want what What do you want (trace).

  natural kind. A category of objects as found in nature, like robins, animals, crabgrass, carbon, and mountains; as opposed to artifacts (man-made objects) and nominal kinds (categories specified by a precise definition, like senators, bachelors, brothers, and provinces).