About this video

• Video Title: Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain | Big Think
• Channel: Big Think
• Speakers: Steven Pinker
• Duration: 00:50:01

Overview

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, discusses language not as an academic subject, but as a crucial lens through which to understand the human mind. He explores the nature of language, its distinction from writing and grammar rules, its acquisition by children, and the underlying mechanisms of its production and comprehension. The video also touches upon the scientific study of language, including linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics, highlighting the complexity and wonder of this uniquely human faculty.

Key takeaways

• Language is a fundamental trait distinguishing humans, essential for cooperation and achieving complex tasks through shared knowledge.
• The study of language encompasses grammar, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics, as well as psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
• Language should not be confused with writing, prescriptive grammar rules (which can be arbitrary and nonsensical), or thought itself, as cognition can exist without language.
• The creativity and productivity of language, allowing for the generation and understanding of novel sentences, are explained by grammar as an internalized set of rules, rather than memorization.
• Children acquire language through an innate "universal grammar," evidenced by their ability to generalize grammatical rules despite the "poverty of the input" (limited and imperfect linguistic data).
• Speech production involves complex manipulation of the vocal tract, while speech comprehension is a challenging computational process due to co-articulation and the absence of clear word segmentation in the sound wave.
• Pragmatics, the understanding of language in context using world knowledge and communicative assumptions, is crucial for effective communication and is difficult for computers to replicate.

Steven Pinker differentiates between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar by explaining that descriptive grammar characterizes how people actually speak, while prescriptive grammar sets rules for how people ought to speak, particularly in formal writing.

He provides two main examples of what he considers flawed prescriptive rules:

1. Splitting infinitives: Pinker argues that the rule against splitting infinitives (e.g., "to boldly go") is based on a faulty analogy with Latin, where infinitives are single words and cannot be split. He points out that applying this rule to English often clashes with the natural rhythm and structure of the language.
2. Double negatives: Pinker states that the rule against using double negatives (e.g., "I can't get no satisfaction") is often promoted as a rule of logic, but it's actually based on historical dialectal preferences. He explains that the perceived incorrectness of "can't get no" versus "can't get any" is due to which dialect became the standard in 17th-century England, rather than any inherent logical flaw.