The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Read Free Book Online

called Motherese (or, as the French call it, Mamanaise): intensive sessions of conversational give-and-take, with repetitive drills and simplified grammar. (“Look at the doggie ! See the doggie? There’s a doggie !”) In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life. The belief that Motherese is essential to language development is part of the same mentality that sends yuppies to “learning centers” to buy little mittens with bull’s-eyes to help their babies find their hands sooner.
    One gets some perspective by examining the folk theories about parenting in other cultures. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa believe that children must be drilled to sit, stand, and walk. They carefully pile sand around their infants to prop them upright, and sure enough, every one of these infants soon sits up on its own. We find this amusing because we have observed the results of the experiment that the San are unwilling to chance: we don’t teach our children to sit, stand, and walk, and they do it anyway, on their own schedule. But other groups enjoy the same condescension toward us. In many communities of the world, parents do not indulge their children in Motherese. In fact, they do not speak to their prelinguistic children at all, except for occasional demands and rebukes. This is not unreasonable. After all, young children plainly can’t understand a word you say. So why waste your breath in soliloquies? Any sensible person would surely wait until a child has developed speech and more gratifying two-way conversations become possible. As Aunt Mae, a woman living in the South Carolina Piedmont, explained to the anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath: “Now just how crazy is dat? White folks uh hear dey kids say sump’n, dey say it back to ’em, dey aks ’em ’gain and ’gain ’bout things, like they ’posed to be born knowin’.” Needless to say, the children in these communities, overhearing adults and other children, learn to talk, as we see in Aunt Mae’s fully grammatical BEV.
    Children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire. In fact, we can show that they know things they could not have been taught. One of Chomsky’s classic illustrations of the logic of language involves the process of moving words around to form questions. Consider how you might turn the declarative sentence A unicorn is in the garden into the corresponding question, Is a unicorn in the garden? You could scan the declarative sentence, take the auxiliary is , and move it to the front of the sentence:
    a unicorn is in the garden.
    is a unicorn the garden?
     
    Now take the sentence A unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden . There are two is ’s. Which gets moved? Obviously, not the first one hit by the scan; that would give you a very odd sentence:
    a unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden.
    is a unicorn that eating a flower is in the garden?
     
    But why can’t you move that is? Where did the simple procedure go wrong? The answer, Chomsky noted, comes from the basic design of language. Though sentences are strings of words, our mental algorithms for grammar do not pick out words by their linear positions, such as “first word,” “second word,” and so on. Rather, the algorithms group words into phrases, and phrases into even bigger phrases, and give each one a mental label, like “subject noun phrase” or “verb phrase.” The real rule for forming questions does not look for the first occurrence of the auxiliary word as one goes from left to right in the string; it looks for the auxiliary that comes after the phrase labeled as the subject. This phrase, containing the entire string of words a unicorn that is eating a flower , behaves as a single unit. The first is sits deeply buried in it, invisible to the question-forming rule. The second