Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct ****

The first several chapters of this book provide a great introduction to the concerns and major conclusions of modern linguistics. Pinker is an excellent writer, with just the right balance between intriguing examples, clear metaphors, and technical details. I definitely recommend the book to people interested in the subject.

The only major area of linguistics that I wish Pinker had included is sociolinguistics. He is a psychologist by training and is making an argument about human nature, so the lack of sociolinguistics is not surprising. However, the chapter about "The Language Mavens" offered him a perfect opportunity to address the subject. Instead, that chapter is the weakest one. It seeks to discredit prescriptive "experts" instead of discussing how prescriptive rules and standard dialects affect our language use. I didn't care for the negative tone (not present elsewhere in the book), and I was unconvinced by his specific counterexamples.

I read The Language Instinct in a Harper Modern Classics edition. I was excited to see that the bibliography of this "modern classic" includes Jack Hawkins' Explaining Language Universals — a book that includes an article by yours truly! I was hoping for a direct citation to my article, but I guess my influence on Dr Pinker was in the background.