The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (85 page)

© 2005 by Rebecca Goldstein

T
HE
L
ANGUAGE
I
NSTINCT
is dedicated to my parents, “who gave me language”; the ambiguity between nature and nurture was, of course, intentional. As someone who believes that nature has been underestimated in intellectual life, I must begin my life story not with the supportive environment they provided me but earlier, with the kind of people they are. Roslyn Wiesenfeld Pinker has a voracious appetite for ideas, nuanced opinions informed by considerable learning, and a keen insight into people; she exemplifies the credo of Terence (which she once recommended to me as an epigraph): “I am a person; nothing human is foreign to me.” Harry Pinker has a gift for sizing up a complicated situation and capturing its essence in a succinct observation; he has, in addition, a taste for new experiences, a willingness to take calculated risks, and an ability to deal with setbacks coolly. I cannot say whether I have inherited doses of these traits, but I do know that my parents nurtured them in me. And as many authors say after thanking their commentators, “All remaining faults are my own.”

My parents were children of Jewish immigrants who emigrated to Montreal in the 1920s, my father’s parents from Krasnystaw, Poland; my mother’s from Warsaw and Kishinev. Both my parents earned university degrees, and both made midlife career turns foreshadowing the one that led me to write this book. My father moved from real estate and sales to a law practice and the tourist industry. My mother, like many women of her generation, applied her talents in volunteer positions in education and community organizations before developing a professional career, first as a high school guidance counselor (the students called her “Pink the Shrink”), then as the school’s vice principal. My sister Susan, formerly a child psychologist, is now a columnist for Canada’s national paper
The Globe and Mail
and the author of a book on sex differences. My brother Robert is an economist and a policy analyst for the Canadian government in Ottawa.

My larger environment was Montreal, and people often ask me whether growing up in a bilingual society launched my interest in language. The answer, sadly, is no. Canada in the 1950s and 1960s was a land of “two solitudes,” as the title of a classic book put it, with the French- and English-speaking communities of Montreal occupying different halves of the island. I learned French in public school from North African Jews because of Quebec’s bizarre educational system of the time, which segregated the Catholics from the so-called Protestants (actually, the non-Catholics) and thus hired Moroccan and Algerian immigrants to teach French to the likes of me. The cultural environment of my childhood was polite Anglo-Saxon Canada; the cultural environment of my adolescence was argumentative Jewish Montreal. We had a saying—“Ten Jews, eleven opinions”—and my home life was rich with friends and family engaging in good-natured debate around the dinner table. The disputations grew especially intense during the late 1960s, when everything seemed up for grabs. During those years I became particularly interested in conceptions of human nature and how they affect every other sphere of life, from politics and economics to education and art.

Like most Montrealers, I stayed in the city after high school, attending first Dawson College and then McGill University. Throughout high school and college I had zigzagged between the sciences and humanities, and I chose to major in cognitive psychology because it seemed capable of addressing deep questions about human nature with a tractable program of experimental research. McGill had been a hothouse for psychology ever since its department was shaped by D. O. Hebb, the first psychologist to model learning in neural networks and apply it to psychological phenomena far and wide. Hebb was still a presence when I was a student, but I was influenced less by his associationism than by the more rationalist approaches to the mind conveyed by my adviser, Albert Bregman, who had been influenced by Gestalt psychology and artificial intelligence, and by a philosophy professor, Harry Bracken, who was a devotee of Noam Chomsky. McGill was also distinguished by research on the human brain pioneered by Wilder Penfield and later, Brenda Milner, at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

In graduate school at Harvard, my primary mentor was a young cognitive psychologist named Stephen Kosslyn, a close friend ever since and now the chairman of the department we both returned to. My thesis was on visual cognition (specifically, the representation of three-dimensional space in mental images), and I did experimental research in that area for another fifteen years. Visual cognition continues to interest me in a number of ways: visual aesthetics, the expression of space in language, and my main nonacademic obsession, photography. Language was originally a side pursuit, which I explored in a theoretical paper on mathematical and computer models of language acquisition. My interest in language also allowed me to study with Roger Brown, the urbane social psychologist who founded the modern study of language acquisition and whose witty and stylish writing has been an inspiration to me ever since. Harvard students could cross-register at MIT, and I took a course on theories of the mind by Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky, and then a course on linguistics and computation by Joan Bresnan, a linguist who had studied with Chomsky before devising her own rival theory. After graduating, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with Bresnan and developed a theory of language acquisition based on her theory, which I later expanded into a technical book,
Language Learnability and Language Development
.

My first job, back at Harvard, required me to teach three courses in language acquisition, and that initiated a drift in my research away from vision and toward language. I pursued two lines of research in language. One was on the meanings and syntax of verbs and how children acquire them; it was presented in a second technical book,
Learnability and Cognition
. The other was on regular and irregular verbs. I often tell people that this falls into the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing, but as I mention in chapter 5 of this book, it is a good way to distinguish the two main psychological processes underlying language, memory and computation. Irregular forms like
sing-sang
and
bring-brought
are idiosyncratic and have to be memorized; regular forms like
fax-faxed
and
spam-spammed
are predictable and can be cranked out by a rule. Since they are matched in meaning and complexity, comparing them can shed light on how memory and computation interact. This line of work resulted in a number of academic papers (including a monograph that analyzed twenty thousand verb forms in the speech of children) and, improbably, a second popular book on language:
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
.

W
RITING
The Language Instinct
was a turning point in my professional life, but it did not come out of the blue. I had long been fascinated by expository prose. I read style manuals for fun, and scrutinized elegant sentences I came across in books and essays to figure out what made them work. I admired writers like George Gamow and Martin Gardner, who explained deep ideas in accessible language, and noted how some of them, like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, were not just popularizers but advanced big ideas within their fields which would have been hard to express within the confines of an academic paper.

I had also felt that psychology obsessed far too much on laboratory curiosities and had lost sight of the big picture—answers to the fundamental questions that curious people naturally ask, like How does language work? and Why are there so many languages? and How do children acquire their mother tongue? This eye on the big picture had always animated my teaching. I never base my courses on a textbook, because textbooks focus on how academics keep themselves busy rather than on fundamental questions, and they slavishly copy earlier textbooks’ arbitrary ways of organizing the subject matter. Many of the expositions in
The Language Instinct
grew out of my attempts to make sense of language for my students. Students provided me with other stimuli for the book—Paul Bloom suggested that we coauthor a paper on the evolution of language, and in a graduate seminar, Annie Senghas and Greg Hickok exposed me to several new lines of research on the biological foundations of language. All of these fed a growing conviction that the variegated phenomena of language could be brought together under the unifying idea that language is an evolutionary adaptation of the human species.

Several editors from university presses encouraged me to try my hand at a book for a larger audience, and one of them gave me a pivotal piece of advice. Most academics who try to reach a wide audience, she explained, are failures. They imagine that they are writing for an unwashed mass of truck drivers and chicken pluckers, and so they talk down to their readers, treating them like slow children. Chicken pluckers don’t buy books, she advised. Think of your readers as your college roommates: people who are as smart and intellectually curious as you and your colleagues but who happened to go into a different line of work, and don’t know your jargon, or your methods, or why you think the topics you study are important. It was tremendously liberating. Writing
The Language Instinct
would not require me to pretend to be a different person. I could continue the conversation I had in my professional life with my students, my colleagues, and myself on what was truly exciting about what we all did, being mindful only that there were newcomers to the conversation who had to be brought up to speed.

I wrote the first draft of
The Language Instinct
over a summer in a day-and-night frenzy, taking one week per chapter, a pace I have not duplicated since. It helped that I didn’t know what I was getting into. A colleague warned me that most books sit in the bookstores for six weeks and then sink into oblivion, so I kept my expectations in check. Subsequent drafts benefited from my editor’s suggestion to add more entertaining examples to the technical sections, and a last-minute decision to put the book through a sixth draft intended only to polish the prose. I had no idea that the book would get such a gratifying reception: more than eighty positive reviews, prizes from the Linguistics Society of America and the American Psychological Association, designation by
The New York Times Book Review
as one of the eleven best books of 1994 and by
American Scientist
as one of the hundred best science books of the century, translation into nineteen languages, and enough interest more than a dozen years later for the publisher to issue the edition you are now holding. Nor could I have foreseen that some of the loose ends would lead to four subsequent books:
How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate
, and
The Stuff of Thought
.

Writing a book for a nonacademic audience also fed back into my academic work. It was only while trying to explain “how language works” in chapter 4 that I realized that my research on regular and irregular forms could be framed in terms of an interplay between memorized arbitrary signs (the principle behind the word) and open-ended combinatorial grammar (the principle behind complex words, phrases, and sentences). The concrete detail necessary to bring an experiment to life for nonspecialist readers—not just “stimuli” but Jabba the Hutt, not just “sentences” but
Furry wildcats fight furious battles
—forced me to go back to the original reports rather than recycle thirdhand summaries, and more than once I discovered that the standard rendering of a classic experiment was flat wrong. I also quickly learned that general science writing holds an author to far higher standards of fact checking than academic writing. A typical journal article is vetted by two referees, read by an audience in the hundreds, and participates in a feedback cycle measured in years. A trade book not only is fair game for attack in these academic journals but also passes under the eyes of hundreds of thousands of readers with expertise in far-flung areas. They are quick to point out any error, always with the stinging line “Though this may seem like a small matter, it raises questions about the standards of accuracy applied to the rest of the book.” I am still shamefaced that the first printing of
The Language Instinct
announced that
flitch
is not an English word and contained the remarkable claim that King Arthur spoke Old English (“You must never have met a Welshman,” wrote one reader).