Rating: 
Summary: Good popular science review of human language
Review: There many good things about this book: it is readable by the non-expert, it is probably the best popular science introduction to language and it contains many valid arguments. However, the book is too verbose, contains too much detail and suffers from lack of pace. Pinker can be obstinate in his arguments which is not necessarily bad. My favorite: Pinker attacks the belief that "people think using words" only to conclude that sometimes people do think using words. The book also lacks a comprehensive discussion on quantitative approaches for language modeling. This was acceptable in 1995 but not today. It is high time to re-write this book!
ps The definition of a Markov model and a finite state machine in the glossary will make many scientists frown.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing book (either you agree or desagree with it)
Review: This book is the sum of more than 45 years of investigation on one specific theoretical linguistic approach: Generative Grammar. So, if you are looking for a book that in a very humourous and clear way explains you the psychological and biological basis of Generativism, you are served.
In Fact, the most important achievement of Pinker is the union he proposses between Chomskyan innatism and Darwinist evolution. Going further than Chomsky himself, Pinker stablishes very good intuitions about the adaptative nature, in the very long term, of course, of our grammatical rules and units. In order to do this, he explains what is a formal approach tolanguage, why Sapir and Whorf were wrong, why language is not a matter of "language specialists@ saying people how to speak correctly, and so on.
This book is strongly reccomended for everyone who wants to know about the nature of human mind and its relation with a computational device called "grammar", but are afraid of specialist jargon (and, more important, It's a very funny prose).
By the way, any "theological" critic to the book just go to show that that kind of readers are not prepared for a serious linguistic research (not even a serious linguistic reflexion), and are deeply misguided about how to investigate on human nature. Human nature is not in a book!
Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the hype
Review: This book has received very good reviews in the press; don't believe the hype.
Pinker's writing style is initially engaging, even fun -- it is perhaps best described as clever -- but after 100 pages or so it becomes annoying. The book is about 500 pages. Furthermore, the page count does not reflect the information content of the book. There is much repetition. Plus some questionable science. And perhaps some uncalled for criticism.
The main problem is that Pinker is trying to advance a theory of language (which is probably at least partially true) without having sufficient evidence in hand, and without even suggesting what it would take to prove or disprove it. This leads to argument-by-repetition and poor science. Intriguing ideas, such as the Whorf hypothesis or animal capacity for language, are glibly dismissed by personally attacking their proponents rather than by counterargument.
I found one chapter, "The Language Mavens", particularly bizarre. In it, Pinker shows his ego by skewering (albeit politely) various writers on language (e.g., Safire and Lederer) for not sharing his linguistic views.
"The Language Instinct" is probably best read as Pinker's version of "Linguistics 101". It is informative and features many linguistics factoids and anecdotes, provided you can get past Pinker's conceit.
Rating:
Summary: I disagree with one reviewer (taking time for one)
Review: The reader, for example from Glasgow Kentucky claims that Pinker's book is a populist account rather than the writing of a professional linguist? Yes, there is debate as to innateness in language, and yes there are professionals on both sides of the debate. To claim that Pinker isn't a professional linguist belies a rather superficial reading of the book, as well as the book's jacket, clearly denoting Pinker's professional qualifications on the knowledge.As for the "contractions violating universal grammar" in BVE, may I suggest a rereading of the chapter...that's not what he claimed. But, I do side with the reviewer that I've cited, that they should read Educating Eve, to get both sides of the story, but please be careful to get "both sides" correct...
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful and packed full of very interesting examples.
Review: For a non-technical and non-orthodox introduction to the origins and characteristics of language this book is excellent. It could be read by anyone who is curious about linguistics as understood by an expert, but whose ideas on the subject are considered somewhat unconventional from the standpoint of modern research in linguistics. Indeed, the very title of this book may raise many an eyebrow from some entrenched schools of modern linguistics. The author though has written a highly interested book here, and after reading it one carries away a deep appreciation of the complexities of language. Some of more interesting and surprising facts that are discussed in the book include: 1. There has never been a tribe or group discovered that does not use language, and there is no evidence that a particular geographical region has acted as source of language that is spread to groups that previously did not use language. These facts do lend credence to the author's thesis that language is instinctual. 2. The level of industrialization or technology of a society apparently is not correlated with the complexity of the language used by that society. Examples of this are given, such as the Bantu language in Tanzania, whose resemblance to English is compared to the difference between chess and checkers. In addition, the author dispels the myth that individuals in the "lower classes" of society do not speak as eloquently or with as much sophistication as the "middle classes". The Black English Vernacular or BEV is cited as an example, and the author quotes studies that indicate higher frequency of grammatical sentences in working-class speech than in middle-class speech. 3. As further evidence to support his thesis that language is instinctual, the author points to the universality of language and language development in children (the latter being his specialty). Interestingly, he states that children reinvent language not because they are "smart" but because "they can't help it." In more than one place in the book he expresses his belief that intelligence is not needed for the acquisition of language. If it indeed it is not, this gives an interesting twist to the current efforts in artificial intelligence to produce machines that are capable of ordinary language. A machine therefore may be designated as "intelligent" even though it does not have ordinary language capabilities. An immediate consequence of this is that one cannot take the absence of the language ability in machines as evidence that they are not intelligent, as is done many times in the literature that is critical of AI. 4. The discussion of `pidgins' and the `creole' that results when children make them their native tongue. The author cites the construction of these creoles as further evidence of his thesis, for children can take the simple pidgin word strings and without any coaching develop a highly sophisticated, very expressive language. Another example of a pidgin, also discussed by the author, is the independent development of sign language by deaf Nicaraguan children after the failure of teaching them speech reading. This eventually resulted in the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense or LSN that is used to this day. It remains to be seen whether the author's thesis will eventually be accepted by future linguists. Further research in neuroscience will no doubt shed light on the real origins of language, and once understood natural language capabilities will no doubt be implemented very straightforwardly in the machines, whether or not it is advantageous or not to have machines with these capabilities.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the Kool-Aid stored?
Review: I waded through a book on modern linguistic theory, scratched my head over the author's apparent misplaced certainty over what seemed awfully flimsy conjecture, and then started on Pinker's book. Is it just me, or has the entire linguistic profession drunk massive amounts of special Kool-Aid? Maybe Chomsky stirred up the first batch, but there's more. One example: after a few paragraphs exhaustively getting to the point about homophones and puns, Pinker says, "if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can't be words," and he seems satisfied that the case is closed. Huh? Who says words are supposed to behave like memory registers in a computer? Context adds meaning; ain't that the point? and by "point", ain't it obvious that I didn't mean a sharpened pencil? even if it's stored (as it is right now) in my brain? This book is very well written, which is why I gave it two stars. But it's fanciful and unscientific. Yes, I know he's at M.I.T. It happens.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I loved this book. I gained from it a greater appreciation of both the complexity and beauty of language.
|
