So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?
It’s entertaining, it’s informative, it’s even funny sometimes, so what more could you want of a popular science/language arts book? My problem is that Pinker comes across, as the song goes, just an inch too sure of himself for me. The Language Instinct gives the strong impression that there are no rival theories worth mentioning, or at least it never bothers to mention any except when relating how Chomsky destroyed this or that primitive misunderstanding. (Given how primitive Pinker makes the pre-Chomsky theories out to be, it wouldn’t actually have been that much of an accomplishment.) Add to that a somewhat loosey-goosey attitude towards what’s an established fact, or what’s logically entailed by certain observations, and it’s hard for me to tell whether certain points are being simplified for pedagogical reasons, set up as straw-men, or simply are the received wisdom of linguistics experts everywhere.
Two examples:
Pinker describes an experiment where children aged 3 to 5 were asked to compound nouns, to see if they would unconsciously follow the rule that words with regular plurals would be compounded in singular form, while ones with irregular plurals would be compounded with the plural form. So a monster that eats mice would be a “mice-eater”, but a monster that eats rats would be a “rat-eater” not a “rats-eater.” The children “obey this restriction fastidiously,” even children who “made the error mouses in their spontaneous speech never called the puppet a mouses-eater.” Personally, I find that curious: if, according to the theory, the word is misfiled in their mental dictionaries, why wouldn’t that show up in all the forms?
But the most interesting discovery came when Gordon examined how the children might have acquired this constraint. Perhaps, he reasoned, they learned it from their parents by listening for whether the plurals that occur inside the parents’ compounds are irregular, regular, or both, and then duplicate whatever kinds of compounds they hear. This would be impossible, he discovered. Motherese just doesn’t have any compounds containing plurals…Gordon’s mice-eater experiment shows that in morphology children automatically distinguish between roots stored in the mental dictionary and inflected words created by a rule.
Impossible is a pretty strong word to use here, considering that children don’t grow up only hearing motherese. In fact, in the first chapter, when it suited the rhetorical point that Pinker was making there, he pointed out that children learn to speak perfectly well in cultures where Motherese doesn’t exist and (according to him) adults regard it as a waste of time talking to children before they’ve learned to speak. Gordon’s experiment certainly shows something about what rules the children have acquired, but unless there are lot of other details that Pinker didn’t recount, it doesn’t show anything about how they acquired them, and it does show one detail that needs some further investigation if the morphological rules are really biologically hard-wired. I.e., if it’s automatic, how is it that a child can say mouses at one point, inflecting the word by rule, and mice-eater at another, using the root from the mental dictionary?
A second example, from the same section on inflection and compounding, he writes
The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front, yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rule cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an -eater?
Nonsense. What is this monster an eater of? is perfectly intelligible. (As is Of what is this monster an eater? for you anti-Churchillian prescriptivists, which puts it in a form closer to that of Pinker’s question rule.) Compound words of this sort are not indivisible “syntactic atoms” even if the syntactic rule for splitting and rearranging them is more complex than the one that Pinker proposed.
In general I have this problem throughout the book. Pinker is so eager to make his case as strongly as possible that he overlooks or ignores obvious counter-examples and skips lightly over potential difficulties, which actually undermines his position with me. Much of it is quite interesting and exciting to me, but when I’m recounting some of the details to my friends I find myself inserting caveats (e.g., Pinker says that they’ve found that children who are raised speaking a pidgen with no grammar spontaneously develop it into a grammatical creole, but…) It may be that he’s basically right, but I don’t place much confidence in it. I might be being too hard on a popularization, but there are other writers (Antonio Damasio, of Descartes’ Error comes to mind) who are much more scrupulous about pointing out difficulties with their pet theories and cautioning the reader that just because a particular experiment really seems to point toward the correctness of the theory there are other possible interpretations.
So, worth reading? Yes. Worth relying on? I wouldn’t unless I could back it up from other sources. It’s tasty, but ultimately unfilling.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004