The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

  natural language. A human language like English or Japanese, as opposed to a computer language, musical notation, formulas in logic, and so on.

  neural network. A kind of computer program or model, loosely inspired by the brain, consisting of interconnected processing units that send signals to one another and turn on or off depending on the sum of their incoming signals.

  neurons. The information-processing cells of the nervous system, including brain cells and the cells whose fibers make up the nerves and spinal cord.

  nominative. The case of the subject of the sentence: SHE loves you (not HER loves you).

  noun. One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a thing or person: dog, cabbage, John, country, hour.

  number. Singular versus plural: duck versus ducks.

  object. The argument adjacent to the verb, typically referring to the entity that defines or is affected by the action: break THE GLASS, draw A CIRCLE, honor YOUR MOTHER. Also, the argument of a preposition: in THE HOUSE, with A MOUSE.

  parameter. One of the ways in which something can vary; in linguistics, one of the ways in which languages can vary from one another (for example, verb-object versus object-verb ordering).

  parsing. One of the mental processes involved in sentence comprehension, in which the listener determines the syntactic categories of words, joins them up in a tree, and identifies the subject, object, and predicate; a prerequisite to determining who did what to whom from the information in the sentence.

  part of speech. The syntactic category of a word: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, conjunction.

  participle. A form of the verb that cannot stand by itself in a sentence but needs to be with an auxiliary or other verb: He has EATEN; It was SHOWN; She is RUNNING; They kept OPENING the door.

  passive. A construction in which the usual object appears as the subject, and the usual subject is the object of the preposition by or absent altogether: He was eaten by wolverines; I was robbed.

  perisylvian. Regions of the brain lining both sides and the end of the Sylvian fissure, the cleft between the temporal lobe and the rest of the brain. Language circuitry is thought to be concentrated in the left perisylvian areas.

  person. The difference between I or we (first person), you (second person), and he/she/they/it (third person).

  philosopher. A scholar who attempts to clarify difficult logical and conceptual questions, especially questions about the mind and about scientific knowledge. Does not refer here to a person who ruminates about the meaning of life.

  phoneme. One of the units of sound that are strung together to form a morpheme, roughly corresponding to the letters of the alphabet: b-a-t; b-ea-t; s-t-ou-t.

  phonetics. How the sounds of language are articulated and perceived.

  phonology. The component of grammar that determines the sound pattern of a language, including its inventory of phonemes, how they may be combined to form natural-sounding words, how the phonemes must be adjusted depending on their neighbors, and patterns of intonation, timing, and stress.

  phrase. A group of words that behaves as a unit in a sentence and which typically has some coherent meaning: in the dark; the man in the gray suit; dancing in the dark; afraid of the wolf.

  phrase structure. The information about the syntactic categories of the words in a sentence, how the words are grouped into phrases, and how the phrases are grouped into larger phrases; usually diagrammed as a tree.

  phrase structure grammar. A generative grammar consisting only of rules that define phrase structures.

  polysynthetic language. An inflecting language in which a word may be composed of a long string of prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

  pragmatics. How language is used in a social context, including how sentences are made to fit in with the flow of a conversation, how unspoken premises are inferred, and how degrees of formality and politeness are signaled.

  predicate. A state, event, or relationship, usually involving one or more participants (arguments). Sometimes the predicate is identified with the verb phrase of a sentence (The baby ATE THE SLUG), and the subject is considered its sole argument; at other times it is identified with the verb alone, and the subject, object, and other complements are all considered to be its arguments. The contradiction can be resolved by saying that the verb is a simple predicate, which combines with its complements to form a complex predicate.

  preposition. One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to a spatial or temporal relationship: in, on, at, near, by, for, under, before, after.

  pronoun. A word that stands for a whole noun phrase: I, me, my, you, your, he, him, his, she, her, it, its, we, us, our, they, them, their, who, whom, whose.

  proposition. A statement or assertion, consisting of a predicate and a set of arguments.

  prosody. The overall sound contour with which a word or sentence is pronounced: its melody (intonation) and rhythm (stress and timing).

  psycholinguist. A scientist, usually a psychologist by training, who studies how people understand, produce, or learn language.

  psychologist. A scientist who studies how the mind works, usually via the analysis of experimental or observational data on people’s behavior. Does not refer here to psychotherapist or to a clinician who treats mental disorders.

  recursion. A procedure that invokes an instance of itself, and thus can be applied repeatedly to create or analyze entities of any size: “How to put words in alphabetical order: sort the words so their first letters are in the same order as in the alphabet; then for each group of words beginning with the same letter, ignore that first letter and put the remaining parts in alphabetical order.” “A verb phrase can consist of a verb followed by a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase.”

  regular. See irregular.

  relative clause. A clause modifying a noun, usually containing a trace corresponding to that noun: the spy WHO LOVED ME; the land THAT TIME FORGOT; violet eyes TO DIE FOR.

  role-player. See argument.

  root. The most basic morpheme in a word or family of related words, consisting of an irreducible, arbitrary sound-meaning pairing: ELECTRicity, ELECTRical, ELECTRic, ELECTRify, ELECTRon.

  semantics. The parts of rules and lexical entries that specify the meaning of a morpheme, word, phrase, or sentence. Does not refer here to haggling over exact definitions.

  sexual recombination. The process that makes organisms capable of generating an immense number of distinct possible offspring. When a sperm or egg is formed, the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes ordinarily found in a human cell (one chromosome in each pair from the mother, one from the father) have to be cut down to twenty-three single chromosomes. This is done in two steps. First, within each pair, a few random cuts are made in identical positions in each chromosome, pieces are exchanged, and the new chromosomes are glued back together. Then, one member of each pair is chosen at random, and put into the egg or sperm. During fertilization, each chromosome from the egg is paired up with its counterpart from the sperm, restoring the genome to twenty-three pairs.

  SLI. Specific Language Impairment, any syndrome in which a person fails to develop language properly and the blame cannot be pinned on hearing deficits, low intelligence, social problems, or difficulty controlling the speech muscles.

  specifier. A specific position at the periphery of a phrase, generally where one finds the subject. For many years the specifier position of a noun phrase was thought to contain the determiner (article), but the current consensus in Chomskyan theory puts the determiner in a phrase of its own (a determiner phrase).

  stem. The main portion of a word, the one that prefixes and suffixes are stuck onto: WALKs, BREAKable, enSLAVE.

  stop consonant. A consonant in which the airflow is completely blocked for a moment: p, t, k, b, d, g.

  strong verb. The verbs in Germanic languages (including English), now all irregular, that form the past tense by changing the vowel: break-broke, s
ing-sang, fly-flew, bind-bound, bear-bore.

  subject. One of the arguments of a verb, typically used for the agent or actor when the verb refers to an action: BELIVEAU scores; THE HIPPIE touched the debutante.

  surface structure (now s-structure). The phrase structure tree formed when movement transformations are applied to a deep structure. Thanks to traces, it contains all the information necessary to determine the meaning of the sentence. Aside from certain minor adjustments (executed by “stylistic” and phonological rules), it corresponds to the actual order of words that a person utters.

  syllable. A vowel or other continuous voiced sound, together with one or more consonants preceding or following it, that are pronounced as a unit: sim-ple, a-lone, en-cy-clo-pe-di-a.

  syntactic atom. One of the senses of “word,” defined as an entity that the rules of syntax cannot separate or rearrange.

  syntactic category. See part of speech.

  syntax. The component of grammar that arranges words into phrases and sentences.

  tense. Relative time of occurrence of the event described by the sentence, the moment at which the speaker utters the sentence, and, often, some third reference point: present (he eats), past (he ate), future (he will eat). Other so-called tenses such as the perfect (He has eaten) involve a combination of tense and aspect.

  top-down. See bottom-up.

  trace. A silent or “understood” element in a sentence, corresponding to the deep-structure position of a moved phrase: What did he put (TRACE) in the garage? (the trace corresponds to what); Boggs was grazed (TRACE) by a fastball (the trace corresponds to Boggs).

  transformational grammar. A grammar composed of a set of phrase structure rules, which build a deep-structure tree, and one or more transformational rules, which move the phrases in the deep structure to yield a surface-structure tree.

  transitive. See intransitive.

  Turing machine. A design for a simple computer consisting of a potentially infinite strip of paper, and a processor that can move along the paper and print or erase symbols on it in a sequence that depends on which symbol the processor is currently reading and which of several states it is in. Though too clumsy for practical use, a Turing machine is thought to be capable of computing anything that any digital computer, past, present, or future, can compute.

  Universal Grammar. The basic design underlying the grammars of all human languages; also refers to the circuitry in children’s brains that allows them to learn the grammar of their parents’ language.

  verb. One of the major syntactic categories, comprising words that typically refer to an action or state: hit, break, run, know, seem.

  voice. The difference between the active and passive constructions: Dog bites man versus Man is bitten by dog.

  voicing. Vibration of the vocal folds in the larynx simultaneous with the articulation of a consonant; the difference between b, d, g, z, v (voiced) and p, t, k, s, f (unvoiced).

  vowel. A phoneme pronounced without any constriction of the airway.

  white matter. See cortex.

  word. See listeme, morphology, syntactic atom.

  X-bar. The smallest kind of phrase, consisting of a head and its non-subject arguments (role-players): The Romans’ DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY; She WENT TO SCHOOL on foot; He is very PROUD OF HIS SON.

  X-bar theory; X-bar phrase structure. The particular kind of phrase structure rules thought to be used in human languages, according to which all the phrases in all languages conform to a single plan. In that plan, the properties of the whole phrase are determined by the properties of a single element, the head, inside the phrase.

  Searchable Terms

  Note: The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  Page numbers prefaced with “PS” are from the “P.S.” section at the end of the book.

  Académie Française, 385

  Accents, 186–170, 176, 295–296, PS11, PS16, PS23

  Afrikaans, 253

  Afro-Asiatic, 256, 259, 261, 262

  Agreement, 14, 32–34, 120–121, 389, 391–392, 404–405, glossary

  Allen, W., 74, 119, 195, 304, 397

  Alpert, N., 315

  Alphabet, 186, 188, 235, 253, PS14, PS22–23

  Altaic languages, 234, 256, 259

  Ambiguity, 69–70, 94, 101, 107, 112, 127, 206–218, 228, 288–289

  American English, 248–250, 295, 388

  American languages, 16, 48, 50–55, 120, 186, 234, 241, 245, 257–260, 262, 267, PS10–11, PS15, PS16

  American Sign Language (ASL), 24, 26–28, 120, 147–148, 344, 346–347, 359, PS17

  Anderson, J., 455

  Anderson, R., 144

  Animal cognition, 5, 45, 59–61, 243, 298, 311, 329, 347

  Animal communication, 154, 329, 343, 363, PS20

  Anomia, 318–321

  Anthropology, 12–15, 48–55, 361–365, 379–381, 421, 427–432, 436

  Apache, 50, 120

  Aphasia, 3, 34–37, 57, 111, 304–308, 313–325, 342, glossary

  Arabic, 165, 256, 259, 261

  Arguments, 99–102, 105–108, 114–115

  Aronoff, M., 454, 458, 460

  Artificial intelligence, 190–195, 199, glossary. See also Computers and language

  ASL, glossary. See also American Sign Language

  Aspect, 26, 128

  Atran, S., 440

  Au, T., 57

  Auditory perception. See Hearing

  Australian languages, 232, 241, 257, 258, 259, 262–274, 292

  Autosegmental phonology, 174–176

  Auxiliaries, 18, 28–31, 110–111, 276, glossary

  Babbling, 269

  Baillargeon, R., 455

  Baker, M., PS 15

  Bantu, 14, 120–121, 167, 234, 256, PS16

  Bar Hillel, Y., 454

  Barry, D., 195, 248

  Barzun, J., 408–409

  Basque, 233, 234, 256, 261

  Bates, E., 351, 377, 450, 461, 463, 465

  Baynes, K., 318

  Beatles, 183

  Behavioral genetics, 333–339, PS11. See also Genes; Genes and language.

  Behavorism, 8–9, 346, 421–423, glossary

  Bellugi, U., 41, 307

  Belushi, J., 168

  Belviso, B., 168

  Benedict, R., 48

  Berlin, B., 440, 451

  Bernstein, T., 394, 402

  Berra, Y., 338

  Berwick, R., 461

  Bever, T., 346, 457, 458

  Bickerton, D., 21, 377, 460, 465

  Bilingualism, 295–296, PS9, PS16–17

  Birdsong, D., 455, 461, PS17

  Black English Vernacular, 16–19, 29, 290, PS11, PS22, PS23

  Bloom, A., 56–57

  Bloom, P., 376, 456, 459, 464, PS5, PS14.

  Boas, F., 48, 54

  Bodmer, W., 447–448

  Bolinger, D., 398, 413, 456

  Bombeck, E., 302–303, 383

  Bergman, D., 399

  Bouchard, T., 335–336

  Bowerman, M., 279

  Bracken, H., PS3.

  Brain, 34–35, 47, 67, 293–294, 304–324, 360, 373–376, 438, PS16, PS18–19

  Brain damage. See Aphasia

  Braine, M., 285, 460

  Brandreth, G., 399, 454

  Breathing, 159–160, 268–269

  Bregman, A., 153, PS3

  Breland, K. and M., 347

  Bresnan, J., 14, 454, 457, 464, PS4, PS13.

  Broca, P., 304

  Broca’s area, 304, 313–317, 319–321, 343, 360, 362, 363, PS18

  Brown, D., 427–432

  Brown, R., 10, 50–51, 152, 272–275, 284, 450, 455, 469, PS4, PS23

  Bryson, B., 466, PS23

  Bush, G. H. W., 337, 403–404

  Bushman. See Khoisan

  Calvin, W., 375

  Campbell, J., 453

  Canadian English, 171

&
nbsp; Caplan, D., 315, 461, 462, 463

  Caramazza, A., 463

  Carey, S., 145, 455, 468

  Carroll, L., 31–32, 80–81, 109, 112, 205

  Case, 108–110, 232–233, 240, 252, 402–406, glossary

  Caucasian languages, 257

  Cavalli-Sforza, L., 256, 258, 260, 447–448, PS16

  Celtic, 233, 251, 254

  Chaucer, G., 252, 277, 389

  Cheney, D., 59, 362

  Cherokee, 15, 186

  Children, 20, 23, 27–34, 58–59, 140–141, 144–145, 146–147, 265–388, 293–299, 248–350, 431, PS4, PS11, PS16–17

  Chimpanzees, 343–359, 361, PS20

  Chinese Sign Language, 147

  Chomsky, C., 456

  Chomsky, N., 8–11, 26, 29–31, 41, 75, 79, 85–89, 95–96, 104, 111, 113–114, 119, 218, 232, 238–239, 304, 341, 365–366, 368, 369, 373–374, 413, 425, 429, 436, 452, 453, PS3, PS4, PS8, PS10, PS11, PS13, PS14, PS20

  Churchill, W., 387

  Clahsen, H., 454

  Clark, E., 455, 458, 460

  Clark, H., 458

  Clicks, 167–168, PS16

  Clinton, B., 404–405, PS14

  Closed-class words. See Function words

  Cognitive science, 3, glossary

  Cole, R., 455

  Coleridge, S. T., 61

  Competence and performance, 195–196, 201–205, 210–212

  Compounds, 122, 126, 136–138, 140–141, 399, 406–407, glossary

  Comprehension, 194–230, 272, 314, 318, PS14–15

  Computers and language, 15, 19, 32, 69–72, 84–90, 122, 123, 157, 165, 178–180, 184–185, 190–195, 199–200, 207–209, 215, 227, 237, 270, PS14, PS14–15, PS20

  Comrie, B., 450, 458, 459

  Concepts, 45, 48–56, 57–61, 68, 70, 147–152, 429–430, 432–434, 437, 438–443

  Conrad, J., 296

  Consonants, 165–166, 169–170, 172–176, 178, 247, glossary

  Content words, glossary. See also Function words

  Cooper, L., 62–63

  Cooper, W., 455

  Corballis, M., 462,

  Cosmides, L., 334, 425, 429, 449, 465, 467, 468

  Crain, S., 31–32, 141

  Creoles and creolization, 20–28, 57, 73, 359, PS11, PS22

  Crick, F., 61