Perhaps the most significant book about grammar to appear since the publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) is Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994). Pinker's book, like much of Chomsky's writing, has special relevance for teachers of English and English as a Second Language. Unlike much of Chomsky's writing, Pinker's theory of language requires no interpreters. His book has the added advantage of being both witty and profound.
Chomsky's arcane pronouncements demanded skilled interpretation that resulted in countless teacher workshops on transformational/generative grammar during the 1960s and '70s. They also led popularizers like Paul Roberts to devise an extensive series of grammar books, grades 3–12, in an attempt to bring the “new” grammar into the nation's schools. Thoughtful readers can understand Pinker's book in two or three sittings.
Before proceeding further, I should mention that language scholars generally use the term grammar to refer to spoken rather than written language, an artificial system devised to represent spoken language. They are little concerned with such matters as misspelling, punctuation, or the prepositions that naughty writers insist on ending their sentences with. They are concerned, instead, with how people use language to communicate and to process the information that surrounds them.
Like many linguistic scholars in the past half century, Pinker, a psychologist, contends that in human beings language is somehow genetically programmed and will emerge independently in children who are left to their own devices. He supports his argument with interesting data about how first-generation African slaves who spoke mutually unintelligible languages communicated. In order to function, they developed pidgin languages, usually devoid of conventional grammatical structures.
Their children, however, in the grammatical process termed creolization, moved beyond their parents' languages and developed, from the pidgin they grew up hearing, a different, more grammatically complex language. No one taught the process to them. Somehow, Pinker says, they knew it naturally.
Many people think that children learn language and other skills through imitating adults. Pinker eschews this notion, pointing out that when 2-year-olds say things like “I goed there” or “They bringed me a present,” they are applying the regular past tense marker, -ed, to irregular verbs. If children are imitating their parents, he asks, why do they misbehave, for example, in public conveyances, where their parents are sitting stock-still annoying no one?
Chomsky contends that some “super-rules” of language are universal and innate (Chomsky 1965, 1972, 1980). Young children quickly fit the conventions of the language that surrounds them to the sets of syntactic structures that are, through genetics, available to them. Different families of languages (Germanic, Romance, Oriental, Arabic) behave differently, particularly in such areas as word order and modification, but children quickly adapt to whatever language environments they are born into. Teachers who deal with nonnative speakers serve their students best if they understand, at least broadly, the grammatical conventions of their students' mother tongues.
Pinker writes consciously for a broader audience than Chomsky sought to address. Chomsky is a “linguist's linguist”; Pinker is, quite calculatedly, a populist linguist. He reveals his bias for studying living language in stating that the insights involved in Universal Grammar (his capital letters) are more general and interesting than those derived from studying ancient languages “because they are about living minds rather than dead tongues” (Pinker, p. 105).
Pinker's most apparent interest is in the dynamics of language. His energy is devoted to bringing to language study a sense of its vitality, which is, obviously, what has motivated his research. English teachers generally and, more specifically, ESL teachers can garner valuable information from Pinker's book and will, perhaps more significantly, imbibe from it some of the author's enthusiasm for language and curiosity about its origins.
