Rating: 
Summary: It's an introduction for most.
Review: For someone who has spent a great deal of time studying linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, this book is quite trivial. However, it brings to the table some intriguing thoughts that most don't contemplate. Language is inherently interesting in that everyone uses it, but few think about it. The beginning of The Language Instinct is mostly a Linguistics 101 review, but without reviewing those necessary principles, one is unable to reach further into the theories. The book was well put together, thought provoking and entertaining. I appreciate seeing a book that allows more than a small population of academics to engage in theoretical thought. Knowledge is for the masses.
Rating: 
Summary: Awful (although English literature people might like it)
Review: I take it I'm allowed to comment without having read more than a quarter of it. I found it utterly boring. I couldn't read it. The author works at a "Center for Cognitive Neuroscience", but this is in no way neuroscience, nor any science. It's a load of dusty old linguistics. It chats into other material at times, but that's the core. It has some cursory reports on psychological experiments, but it doesn't argue systematically with them. Looks like the chapters I didn't read are riddled with speculations about evolution.
Rating: 
Summary: have fun, but beware
Review: Before Pinker's ego spun completely out of control in _How the Mind Works_, we got a slightly less ambitious, and in many ways laudable, book in the form of _The Language Instinct_. Pinker has no scruples: he doesn't care how entertaining he is.The highlights of this book are what linguists have been saying ever since Bloomfield: language change is natural, there's no such thing as "right" or "wrong" grammar or pronunciation, only what is conventional, and so on. It's encouraging to see someone, even a non-linguist, writing a book that says that kind of thing. As an outline of generative linguistics or, more specifically, Chomskyan linguistics with all its psychological baggage (innateness and all that), it's decent. I must admit seeing the same old stuff rehashed nearly prompted me to give up here and there, but that won't be a problem for neophytes. Still, "best introduction to generative grammar out there"? Ugh. God save us. The "hurrahs" and one-sided nature of this book, which bothered reviewers even in pro-Chomsky journals, will, I think, give readers a biased opinion about what linguistics is about and, more important, what linguists think they know. (Pinker has a penchant for claiming we know more than we actually do.) Whatever happened to encouraging skepticism and the tentative nature of scientific claims? The last chapter is interesting, as Pinker, all the while admitting that people will think he's nuts, outlines an outrageously nativist theory of the mind, a precursor to _How the Mind Works_. Pinker practically says that genes determine how long you suck your thumb (I wonder what held him back). Well, you were right, Pinker, some of us think you're a little nuts. Amusing, informative, yes. In the meantime, some of us are waiting for someone in the Langacker/Lakoff camp who can actually write... (To the well-meaning but misinformed reader who accused the "professionals in the field" of being "threatened by his insights": You're about thirty years late. Pinker's "insights" have been orthodox, especially on the East Coast, for a long time.)
Rating: 
Summary: One of the Most Important Books of the Century
Review: This book will clearly be viewed in the future as one of the most important books of the 20th century. Though dismissed with faint praise by many of the other reviewers, many of whom appear to be professionals in the field that are threatened by his insights, Pinker's ideas will probably in a few short years become the accepted viewpoint. And, besides having brains, he's pretty cute.
Rating:
Summary: Despite Excellent Arguments, Some Readers Miss the Point
Review: This is a superb introduction to generative linguistics (both phonology and syntax). Pinker has successfully simplified most of the complex methodological and notational issues to make these somewhat opaque fields more accessible to lay readers. As such, this is an ideal introductory text and a good reference for linguistic types who have had to forego the Ivory Tower but who want to keep their feet wet. What this text is not is an advanced, graduate-level text--and so don't expect that. If you've read any other book on generative theory (or better yet, minimalist theory), this book is backstepping. (Note that the negative reviewers of this title are also showing off how "advanced" they are--thereby missing the very point to this text!) On the other hand, if you're fascinated by language at all, no matter the reason, you owe it to yourself to try this text out. I have colleagues in non-linguistics fields of study (particularly literature) who don't understand why language isn't static, why the idea of "grammaticality" changes over time--or that Black Vernacular English and Sign Language are as well grammared as "standard" English. If you've been curious about any of these issues or more--buy and read "The Language Instinct."
Rating:
Summary: Promotes the idea of a human nature without proving it
Review: People who read this book have to have good education in philosophy (Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein) to see through it. Pinker starts with "proving" that mental grammar is innate and ends up with saying that there should be a common human nature that will make us all brothers. Why weren't we brothers long ago then? This book is filled with similar silly thinking. I am so astonished that I almost fell off the chair that this man can be considered an intellectual. It can only happen in the US!
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but deceptive
Review: Pinker sure is an engaging writer, and his varied pop culture references demonstrate that he is no dry academic. But beware that he also makes a living on misrepresentating "facts." For example, he discusses a deaf child with deaf parents, claiming that the child, whose parents learned Ameslan late in life, used his "language faculty" to correctly deduce the "right" grammar from his parents faulty data. This is highly misleading: in fact, the child still showed a good amount of error, and there was a strong correlation between the percentage of ungrammatical utterances from his parents and the child's. The higher their error rate, the higher the child's. So all the study really showed was that brains are excellent at finding patterns in a mess of data, *not* that the alleged LAD is a factor in fixing the child's syntax, as suggested by principles & parameters theory. But you won't get the whole story from Pinker. In fact, you get what seems to be a purposefully misleading one. A couple other minor quibbles. First, the phrase structure grammar Pinker tentatively outlines is like none I've ever seen, or that any linguist would accept. I suspect that's because Pinker was trying to make PSG look more presentable and "natural" than the real thing. Then there's his statement: "Language is no more a social construct than walking." Basically, he uses this outrageous and unsupported comparison to toss out any functional or social aspect of a theory of language. This all stems from the rationalist ideal of social theories completely divorced from the environment they take place in. Of course, for a staunch supporter of the Cartesian Chomsky, also at MIT, none of this is really surprising. It's just a shame so many people are taken in by it. Finally, note that Pinker is not a linguist, as many people (at least one reviewer, anyway) seem to believe. He is a cognitive psychologist whose main focus often seems to be in linguistics.
Rating:
Summary: crisp, well-structured overview to language and speech
Review: A comprehensive overview on how we learn language, how we speak and how we communicate by means of sentences and words. A counterweight to the 60's and 70's environment focused learning theories and invaluable by the authors clear intentions - he does not hide what he's going to teach you. The german translation (to which I refer) is very well done, too.
Rating:
Summary: A cogent argument for the evolution of language
Review: The Language Instinct is one of the best books I've read in quite a while. Pinker's writing is clear, easy to follow, and well thought out. His sense of humor is insidious: just when I thought I was mired in some abstruse concept with no hope of getting untangled, he would slip in a word, a subtle reference, or a bit of seemingly out of place vernacular that always brought a smile to my face, and often had me laughing out loud, but it never failed to show me the path out of the briarpatch. I highly recommend this book and I plan to read his other works, as well. Were I planning a dinner party and could invite anyone, Pinker would definitely make the short list.
Rating:
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: I'm reading The Language Instinct for a linguistics course. This is really interesting stuff and very readable. I've learned some very interesting theories about how people learn languages, much more plausible than the "we copy our parents" theory I was raised on. But there's a lot more than just how we learn language. This is about how we are constantly re-creating language, and although the ideas are expressed in English, they apply to every spoken language.
Read it!
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