The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

I find it hard to believe sometimes that Stephen Pinker teaches at MIT. You mean some scientists do actually have a sense of humor? Anyone who reads this book had better have a great sense of humor, a love of the absurd, and a desire to really understand language. I'm in Science Education, not linguistics, but because I am deaf and studying how deaf people learn, it ends up with a lot of linguistic study in it. Usually the books from this lot of scientists are mind-boggling hard to get through, but not Mr. Pinker. If he teaches like he writes, then he must be a heck of a teacher! Mr. Pinker is also one of the few linguists who aren't devoted to ASL studies who includes information about American Sign Language that makes it clear that it is a real language in its own right. That alone would endear Dr. Pinker to the Deaf culture. This books takes all those difficult concepts concerning the innateness of language, and conveys them to the layman in an easy-to-understand way. He is never patronizing and always funny. I enjoy reading the book, which I often have to do since I use it in my papers a lot. To say Dr. Pinker's book is brilliant is a statement of fact. It's too bad some scientists in other fields couldn't take a cue from him and get a sense of humor! Karen L. Sadler Science Education, University of Pittsburgh, [email protected]

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.

pinker is one of the most fun-to-read popular science authors currently on the scene (how the mind works and words and rules are also enjoyable, tho w&r less so than either lg instinct or htmw). therefore, his book is a good place to start for the person interested in language and linguistics but with little or no background.
for those with little background, tho, some of the going may get a bit rough, as pinker goes fairly deep into one particular theory of language, closely related to the ideas of pinker's MIT colleague noam chomsky. while i respect both pinker and chomsky, i find both of them to pay far too little attention to how languages change over time and to how 'exotic' languages like navajo, finnish, and ingush work.
chapter 12 provides a pretty good (tho occasionally angry) antidote to people who insist on answering 'can i go to the bathroom?' with 'i don't if you can, but you may'.