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

the front of the sentence to form questions and other constructions, always in a structure-dependent way. But this is not the only way one could design a question rule. One could just as effectively move the leftmost auxiliary in the string to the front, or flip the first and last words, or utter the entire sentence in mirror-reversed order (a trick that the human mind is capable of; some people learn to talk backwards to amuse themselves and amaze their friends). The particular ways that languages do form questions are arbitrary, species-wide conventions; we don’t find them in artificial systems like computer programming languages or the notation of mathematics. The universal plan underlying languages, with auxiliaries and inversion rules, nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, phrases and clauses, case and agreement, and so on, seems to suggest a commonality in the brains of speakers, because many other plans would have been just as useful. It is as if isolated inventors miraculously came up with identical standards for typewriter keyboards or Morse code or traffic signals.
    Evidence corroborating the claim that the mind contains blueprints for grammatical rules comes, once again, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Take the English agreement suffix -s as in He walks . Agreement is an important process in many languages, but in modern English it is superfluous, a remnant of a richer system that flourished in Old English. If it were to disappear entirely, we would not miss it, any more than we miss the similar -est suffix in Thou sayest . But psychologically speaking, this frill does not come cheap. Any speaker commited to using it has to keep track of four details in every sentence uttered:
     
whether the subject is in the third person or not: He walks versus I walk .
whether the subject is singular or plural: He walks versus They walk .
whether the action is present tense or not: He walks versus He walked .
whether the action is habitual or going on at the moment of speaking (its “aspect”): He walks to school versus He is walking to school.
     
    And all this work is needed just to use the suffix once one has learned it. To learn it in the first place, a child must ( 1 ) notice that verbs end in -s in some sentences but appear bare-ended in others, (2) begin a search for the grammatical causes of this variation (as opposed to just accepting it as part of the spice of life), and (3) not rest until those crucial factors—tense, aspect, and the number and person of the subject of the sentence—have been sifted out of the ocean of conceivable but irrelevant factors (like the number of syllables of the final word in the sentence, whether the object of a preposition is natural or man-made, and how warm it is when the sentence is uttered). Why would anyone bother?
    But little children do bother. By the age of three and a half or earlier, they use the -s agreement suffix in more than ninety percent of the sentences that require it, and virtually never use it in the sentences that forbid it. This mastery is part of their grammar explosion, a period of several months in the third year of life during which children suddenly begin to speak in fluent sentences, respecting most of the fine points of their community’s spoken language. For example, a preschooler with the pseudonym Sarah, whose parents had only a high school education, can be seen obeying the English agreement rule, useless though it is, in complex sentences like the following:
    When my mother hangs clothes, do you let ’em rinse out in rain?
    Donna teases all the time and Donna has false teeth.
    I know what a big chicken looks like.
    Anybody knows how to scribble.
    Hey, this part goes where this one is, stupid.
    What comes after “C”?
    It looks like a donkey face.
    The person takes care of the animals in the barn.
    After it dries off then you can make the bottom.
    Well, someone hurts himself and everything.
    His tail sticks out like this.
    What happens