Genealogy Books - The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)

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Summary: Seems quite plausible
Comment: I do software programming. His way of explaining a system where we can handle interpreting
sentences "on the fly", from a starting word, building a structure of meaning while proceeding to an
unknown end (the end of the sentence is not known to us until we get there) is consitent with how
computers determine the meaning of commands. Showing the place of recursion is impressive. The
book is not always easy to read, but I was impressed with the quality and consistency of thought. I
hated grammer in 7th grade (in the 1960s), so my English teacher would have been amazed at my
reading a book on language. I recommend this book highly.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A smart professor with good writing skills
Comment: Pinker's strength is not in his original ideas. It's in his writing. He can explain, provoke
thought, and elucidate, and he does so masterfully.

You may not agree with the ideas. That's fine,
but a person seeking an introduction into the world of psycholinguistics, can do much worse than
read The Language Instinct.

Pinker writes with wit, sarcasm, and passion. He is clearly thought
provoking, and sometimes angst provoking as well. He likes to bash people he doesn't agree with, and
he does so with flair and humour - you may not like that, but it definitely shows that Pinker cares
about his subject deeply, and it clearly shows the controversy in these subjects.

I heartily
recommend this book. This is one of the popular science books you can read, understand, and quite
often laugh in the process.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Needs an editor
Comment: Pinker needs a good editor as this book could have easily been cut down to two hundred pages. Pinker
doesn't make his points; he jackhammers them a thousand times before moving on to his next topic.

In addition to his severe chatterbox syndrome, readers should know that there is nothing new in
this book. This is third generation Chomsky - and when it comes to Chomsky, people usually embrace
his theories without any proof. Saying that we are genetically hard wired for speech is no more
startling than saying that we are hard wired to walk on two legs rather than on all fours or to
grasp objects with the use of opposable thumbs. So what? It is a big jump from there to claiming
that we are hard wired for language and that there is a universal grammar that applies to every
language. There isn't. For every grammar rule that the Chomsky camp claims is universal, there is an
exception. Does the Chomsky camp give up when presented with this evidence? Nope, they change the
rules of the game. Of course, you can win if you keep changing the rules, retreat from positions,
dismiss (or ignore) the exceptions. Who couldn't?
This book will seem fascinating if you have
never had any prior exposure to linguistics. To those of us who have, it is nothing but a tiresome
anthology of what has been written in the last 50 years. This field has been rightfully marginalized
in academia (the professors who teach this are usually relegated to the bottom of the humanities
department with Feminist theorists, Marxists, and post-modernist literary theorists).

Customer Rating:

Summary: An engagingly erroneous professor
Comment: I am a speech-language pathologist who is still waiting for empirical proof that Chomsky is correct.
I doubt that I will see it in my lifetime - or ever. You need to know that Pinker is a passionate,
obsessional convert to Chomsky and that he has many axes to grind. He is a radical descriptivist
and, like most in that school, derides (and even dismisses) standard American English. He does this
while building a successful career as a writer who has mastered, very engagingly, Standard American
English. In fact, his mastery of SAE is his only appeal, in my view. What we have here is a man who
dismisses SAE standards while writing books that are bestsellers because they are written in an
excellent SAE style. How many books would he sell if he wrote in BAE (black American English)? I
doubt that he could even express the complex ideas he adheres to in BAE, despite his protests that
all languages are equally comple.
Pinker spends hundreds of pages trying to convince us that
Chomsky is correct. It remains true, however, that the rules of grammar that would apply to every
language known to man would fill a page of text and this slim commonality could be dismissed as
being a product of our shared species, not some language device that, so far, only exists as a
metaphysical fantasy.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Wrong, wrong, wrong
Comment: I am a speech-language pathologist who is still waiting for empirical proof that Chomsky is correct.
I doubt that I will see it in my lifetime - or ever. You need to know that Pinker is a breathlessly
passionate, obsessional convert to Chomsky and that he has many, many liberal axes to grind. He is a
radical descriptivist and, like most in that school, derides and dismisses standard American English
in favor of supposedly superior dialects. In the typical self-hating liberal caucasian pattern, he
starts out by claiming that all languages are equally complex and then goes on to knock his own
heritage of Standard American English for its supposed deficiencies and inferiority. He does this
while building a successful career as a writer whose mastery of SAE is his only appeal, in my view.
What we have here is a man who dismisses SAE standards while writing books that are bestsellers
because they are written in an excellent SAE style. Only in academia could we find such nonsense and
such self-loathing among educated white men and women. How many books would Pinker sell if he wrote
in BAE (black American English)? I doubt that he could express the complex ideas he adheres to in
BAE, despite his protests that all languages are equally complex (and if Pinker really thinks that
BAE is complex enough to express any thought, I challenge him to explain Chomsky's theories in it).

Pinker spends hundreds of pages trying to convince us that Chomsky is correct. He fails. This
book is not a reasoned argument. It is the ravings of a man who throws out whatever examples he can
find to support his religious-like adherence to Chomsky - only he doesn't tell you that he ignores
all of the examples that argue against his viewpoint. Where is this supposed language device that,
so far, only exists as a metaphysical fantasy in Pinker's mind?
Oh yeah, and I am sick of hearing
how Chomsky is one of the most quoted intellectuals in the twentieth century. It is dishonest of
Pinker to make that statement and not carefully add that Chomsky is usually quoted for his radical,
virulently anti-American political writings that have absolutely nothing to do with his linguistic
work. The fact is, few people actually read his linguistic work. They are nearly unreadable.
If
you read this book, take with a grain of salt. Keep your eyes open for the many inconsistencies.

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