The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

  Aunt Mae: Heath, 1983, p. 84.

  Structure dependence: Chomsky, 1975.

  Children, Chomsky, and Jabba: Crain & Nakayama, 1986.

  Universal auxiliaries: Steele et al., 1981. Language universals: Greenberg, 1963; Comrie, 1981; Shopen, 1985. Fluent backwards talkers: Cowan, Braine, & Leavitt, 1985.

  Language development: Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1989; Ingram, 1989.

  Sarah masters agreement: Brown, 1973. Examples are from a computer search of Sarah’s transcripts in the Child Language Data Exchange System; MacWhinney, 1991.

  Children’s creative errors (be’s, gots, do’s): Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen, & Xu, 1992.

  Recovered aphasic: Gardner, 1974, p. 402. Permanent aphasic: Gardner, 1974, pp. 60–61.

  Language mutants: Gopnik, 1990a, b; Gopnik & Crago, 1991; Gopnik, 1993.

  Blatherers: Cromer, 1991.

  More blatherers: Curtiss, 1989.

  Williams syndrome: Bellugi et al., 1991, 1992.

  3. Mentalese

  Newspeak: Orwell, 1949, pp. 246–247, 255.

  Language and animal rights: Singer, 1992. General Semantics: Korzybski, 1933; Hayakawa, 1964; Murphy, 1992.

  Sapir: Sapir, 1921. Whorf: Carroll, 1956.

  Sapir: Sapir, 1921. Boas school: Degler, 1991; Brown, 1991. Whorf: Carroll, 1956.

  Early Whorf critics: Lenneberg, 1953; Brown, 1958.

  Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache: quoted in Brown, 1958, p. 232; see also Espy, 1989, p. 100.

  Color lexicons: Crystal, 1987, p. 106.

  Color vision: Hubel, 1988.

  Color universals: Berlin & Kay, 1969. New Guineans learn red: Heider, 1972.

  Timeless Hopi: Carroll, 1956, p. 57. Also pp. 55, 64, 140, 146, 153, 216–17.

  Hopi prayer hour: Malotki, 1983, p. 1.

  Hopi time: Brown, 1991; Malotki, 1983.

  The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax: Martin, 1986; Pullum, 1991.

  Pullum on Eskimos: Pullum, 1991, pp. 162, 165–166. “Polysynthetic perversity” is an in-joke, from the linguist’s classification of Eskimo languages as “polysynthetic”; compare Freud’s “polymorphous perversity.”

  Whorf in the lab: Cromer, 1991b; Kay & Kempton, 1984.

  Subjunctives and the Chinese mind: Bloom, 1981, 1984; Au, 1983, 1984; Liu, 1985; Takano, 1989.

  A man without words: Schaller, 1991.

  Baby thoughts: Spelke et al., 1992. Baby arithmetic: Wynn, 1992.

  Animal thinking: Gallistel, 1992. Monkey friends and relations: Cheney & Seyfarth, 1992.

  Visual thinkers: Shepard, 1978; Shepard & Cooper, 1982. Einstein: Kosslyn, 1983.

  Mind’s eye: Shepard & Cooper, 1982; Kosslyn, 1983; Pinker, 1985.

  Representational theory of mind: in Haugeland, 1981, articles by Haugeland, Newell & Simon, Pylyshyn, Dennett, Marr, Searle, Putnam, and Fodor; in Pinker and Mehler, 1988, articles by Fodor & Pylyshyn and Pinker & Prince; Jackendoff, 1987.

  English versus mentalese: Fodor, 1975; McDermott, 1981.

  Headlines: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.

  An example of mentalese: Jackendoff, 1987; Pinker, 1989.

  4. How Language Works

  Arbitrary sound-meaning relation: Saussure, 1916/1959.

  Infinite use of finite media: Humboldt, 1836/1972.

  Discrete combinatorial systems: Chomsky, 1991; Abler, 1989; Studdert-Kennedy, 1990.

  Discrete inheritance and evolution: Dawkins, 1986.

  110-word Shavian sentence: example from Jacques Barzun; cited in Bolinger, 1980.

  Faulker example (with modifications): Espy, 1989.

  Sentences commenting on their own ungrammaticality: David Moser, cited in Hofstadter, 1985.

  Nineteenth-century nonsense: Hofstadter, 1985.

  Sleeping esophagus: Twain, “Double-Barreled Detective Story.” Example from Lederer, 1990.

  Pobbles: Edward Lear, “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Jabber-wocky: Carroll, 1871/1981. Colorless green ideas: Chomsky, 1957.

  Automated news story: Frayn, 1965. Example from Miller, 1967.

  Gobbledygook generators: Brandreth, 1980; Bolinger, 1980; Spy magazine, January 1993.

  Approximations to English: Miller & Selfridge, 1950.

  Finite-state devices and their problems: Chomsky, 1957; Miller & Chomsky, 1963; Miller, 1967. TV Guide example from Gleitman, 1981.

  Cook with round bottom: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980; Lederer, 1987.

  Impenetrable Chomsky: Chomsky, 1986, p. 79. Textbooks on modern grammatical theory: Friedin, 1992; Radford, 1988; Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986.

  Sex between parked cars: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.

  X-bar syntax: Jackendoff, 1977; Kornai & Pullum, 1990.

  Word-order correlations: Greenberg, 1963; Dryer, 1992.

  Verbs’ demands: Grimshaw, 1990; Pinker, 1989.

  Blinkenlights: Raymond, 1991.

  Deep structure: Chomsky, 1965, 1988. Chomsky on doing without d-structure: Chomsky, 1991. Chomsky still believes that there are several phrase structures underlying a sentence; he simply wants to eliminate the idea that there is a special one called d-structure, a single framework defined for the entire sentence into which the verbs are then plugged. The suggested replacement is to have each verb come with a chunk of phrase structure preinstalled; the sentence is assembled by snapping together the various chunks.

  5. Words, Words, Words

  Grammatical Man: Campbell, 1982. Chomsky in Rolling Stone: issue 631, May 28, 1992, p. 42. The Whore of Mensa: Allen, 1983.

  Bantu verbs: Bresnan & Moshi, 1988; Wald, 1990.

  Part-Vulcans and other novel forms: Sproat, 1992.

  Word-building machinery: Aronoff, 1976; Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; Di Sciullo & Williams, 1987; Kiparsky, 1982; Selkirk, 1982; Sproat, 1992; Williams, 1981. The anti-missile missile example is from Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.

  Inflectional rules as linguistic fruit flies: Pinker & Prince, 1988, 1992; Pinker, 1991.

  People versus artificial neural networks: Prasada & Pinker, 1993; Sproat, 1992; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986.

  Man sold as pet fish: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980.

  Heads of words: Williams, 1981; Selkirk, 1982.

  Hackitude: Raymond, 1991.

  Irregular verbs: Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; Kiparsky, 1982; Pinker & Prince, 1988, 1992; Pinker, 1991; Mencken, 1936. Irregular doggerel: author unknown, from Espy, 1975.

  Dizzy Dean: Staten, 1992; Espy, 1975.

  Irregularity and young minds: Yourcenar, 1961; quotation from Michael Maratsos.

  Flying out: Kiparsky, 1982; Kim, Pinker, Prince, & Prasada, 1991; Kim, Marcus, Pinker, Hollander, & Coppola, in press; Pinker & Prince, 1992; Marcus, Clahsen, Brinkmann, Wiese, Woest, and Pinker, 1993.

  Walkmans versus Walkmen: Newsweek, August 7, 1989, p. 68.

  Mice-eaters: Kiparsky, 1982; Gordon, 1986.

  Morphological products, syntactic atoms, and listemes: Di Sciullo and Williams, 1987.

  Shakespeare’s vocabulary: Bryson, 1990; Kuera, 1992. Shakespeare used about 30,000 different word forms, but many of these were inflected variants of a single word, like angel and angels or laugh and laughed. Applying statistics from contemporary English, one would get an estimate of about 18,000 word types, but this must be adjusted downward to about 15,000 because Shakespeare used more inflections than we do; for example, he used both -eth and -s.

  Counting words: Miller, 1977, 1991; Carey, 1978; Lorge & Chall, 1963.

  Typical vocabulary size: Miller, 1991.

  Word as arbitrary symbol: Saussure, 1916/1959; Hurford, 1989.

  “You” and “me” in ASL: Petitto, 1988.

  “Gavagai!”: Quine, 1960.

  Categories: Rosch, 1978; Anderson, 1990.

  Babies and objects: Spelke et al., 1992; Baillargeon, in press.

  Children learning words: Markman, 1989.

  Children, words, and kinds: Markman, 1989; Keil, 1989; Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1989, 1994. Sibbing: Brown, 1957; Gleitman, 1990.

&n
bsp; 6. The Sounds of Silence

  Sine-wave speech: Remez et al., 1981.

  “Duplex” perception of speech components: Liberman & Mattingly, 1989.

  McGurk effect: McGurk & MacDonald, 1976.

  Speech segmentation: Cole & Jakimik, 1980.

  Oronyms: Brandreth, 1980.

  Pullet surprises: Lederer, 1987; Brandreth, 1980; LINGUIST electronic bulletin board, 1992.

  Smeared phonemes: Liberman et al., 1967.

  Rate of speech perception: Miller, 1967; Liberman et al., 1967; Cole & Jakimik, 1980.

  DragonDictate: Bamberg & Mandel, 1991.

  Vocal tract: Crystal, 1987; Lieberman, 1984; Denes & Pinson, 1973; Miller, 1991; Green, 1976; Halle, 1990.

  Phonetic symbolism: Brown, 1958.

  Fiddle-faddle, flim-flam: Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.

  Razzle-dazzle, rub-a-dub-dub: Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.

  Speech gestures and distinctive features: Halle, 1983, 1990.

  Speech sounds across the world: Halle, 1990; Crystal, 1987.

  Speaking in tongues: Thomason, 1984; Samarin, 1972.

  “Giacche Enne Binnestaucche”: Espy, 1975.

  Syllables and feet: Kaye, 1989; Jackendoff, 1987.

  Phonological rules: Kenstowicz & Kisseberth, 1979; Kaye, 1989; Halle, 1990; Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991.

  Phonology with tiers: Kaye, 1989.

  Shaw: Preface to Pygmalion. Slurvian: Lederer, 1987.

  American pronunciation: Cassidy, 1985. Teachers with accents: Boston Globe, July 10, 1992.

  Speaker versus hearer: Bolinger, 1980; Liberman & Mattingly, 1989; Pinker & Bloom, 1990.

  Quine on redundancy: Quine, 1987.

  Graceful motion: Jordan & Rosenbaum, 1989.

  Why speech recognition is hard: Liberman et al., 1967; Mattingly & Studdert-Kennedy, 1991; Lieberman, 1984; Bamberg & Mandel, 1991; Cole & Jakimik, 1980.

  Nonsense in noise: Miller, 1967. Phonemic restoration effect: Warren, 1970.

  Problems with top-down perception: Fodor, 1983.

  Mondegreens: LINGUIST electronic bulletin board, 1992.

  HEARSAY system: Lesser et al., 1975.

  DragonDictate: Bamberg & Mandel, 1991.

  Spelling poem: quoted in C. Chomsky, 1970.

  Shaw: from Crystal, 1987, p. 216.

  Written versus spoken language: Liberman et al., 1967; Miller, 1991.

  Writing systems: Crystal, 1987; Miller, 1991; Logan, 1986.

  Two tragedies in life: from Man and Superman.

  Rationality of English orthography: Chomsky & Halle, 1968/1991; C. Chomsky, 1970.

  Twain on foreigners: from The Innocents Abroad.

  7. Talking Heads

  Artificial Intelligence: Winston, 1992; Wallich, 1991; The Economist, 1992.

  Turing Test of whether machines can think: Turing, 1950.

  ELIZA: Weizenbaum, 1976.

  Loebner Prize competition: Shieber, in press.

  Fast comprehension: Garrett, 1990; Marslen-Wilson, 1975.

  Style: Williams, 1990.

  Parsing: Smith, 1991; Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978; Yngve, 1960; Kaplan, 1972; Berwick et al., 1991; Wanner, 1988; Joshi, 1991; Gibson, in press.

  Magical number seven: Miller, 1956.

  Dangling sentences: Yngve, 1960; Bever, 1970; Williams, 1990.

  Memory and grammatical load: Bever, 1970; Kuno, 1974; Hawkins, 1988.

  Right-, left-, and center-embedding: Yngve, 1960; Miller & Chomsky, 1963; Miller, 1967; Kuno, 1974; Chomsky, 1965.

  Number of rules for child to learn: Pinker, 1984.

  Breadth-first dictionary lookup: Swinney, 1979; Seidenberg et al., 1982.

  Killer sentenced to die twice: Columbia Journalism Review, 1980; Lederer, 1987.

  Garden path sentences: Bever, 1970; Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Wanner, 1988; Gibson, in press.

  Multiple trees in memory: MacDonald, Just, and Carpenter, 1992; Gibson, in press.

  Modularity of mind: Fodor, 1983. Modularity debate: Fodor, 1985; Garfield, 1987; Marslen-Wilson, 1989.

  General smarts and understanding sentences: Trueswell, Tanenhaus, and Garnsey, in press.

  Verbs help parsing, pro and con: Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, in press; Ford et al., 1982; Frazier, 1989; Ferreira & Henderson, 1990.

  Computer parsers: Joshi, 1991.

  Late closure and minimal attachment, pro and con: Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Ford et al., 1982; Wanner, 1988; Garfield, 1987.

  The language of judges: Solan, 1993. Language and law: Tiersma, 1993.

  Fillers and gaps: Wanner & Maratsos, 1978; Bever & McElree, 1988; MacDonald, 1989; Nicol & Swinney, 1989; Garnsey, Tanenhaus, & Chapman, 1989; Kluender & Kutas, 1993; J. D. Fodor, 1989.

  Shortening filler-gap distances: Bever, 1970; Yngve, 1960; Williams, 1990. Bounding phrase movement to help parsing: Berwick & Weinberg, 1984.

  Watergate transcripts: Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, 1974; New York Times Staff, 1974.

  Masson v. The New Yorker Magazine: Time, July 1, 1991, p. 68; Newsweek, July 1, 1991, p. 67.

  Discourse, pragmatics, and inference: Grice, 1975; Levinson, 1983; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Leech, 1983; Clark & Clark, 1977.

  Scripts and stereotypes: Schanck & Riesbeck, 1981. Programming common sense: Freedman, 1990; Wallich, 1991; Lenat & Guha, 1990.

  Logic of conversation: Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986.

  Letter of recommendation: Grice, 1975; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975.

  Politeness: Brown & Levinson, 1987.

  Conduit metaphor: Lakoff & Johnson, 1980.

  8. The Tower of Babel

  Variation without limit: Joos, 1957, p. 96. One Earthly language: Chomsky, 1991.

  Language differences: Crystal, 1987; Comrie, 1990; Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University.

  Language universals: Greenberg, 1963; Greenberg, Ferguson, & Moravscik, 1978; Comrie, 1981; Hawkins, 1988; Shopen, 1985; Keenan, 1976; Bybee, 1985.

  History versus typology: Kiparsky, 1976; Wang, 1976; Aronoff, 1987.

  SOV, SVO, and center-embedding: Kuno, 1974.

  Crosslinguistic meaning of “subject”: Keenan, 1976; Pinker, 1984, 1987.

  Human versus animal communication: Hockett, 1960.

  Evolution disfavoring change for change’s sake: Williams, 1966.

  Babel speeds evolution: Dyson, 1979; Babel provides women: Crystal, 1987, p. 42.

  Languages and species: Darwin, 1874, p. 106.

  Evolution of innateness and learning: Williams, 1966; Lewontin, 1966; Hinton & Nowlan, 1987.

  Why there is language learning: Pinker & Bloom, 1990.

  Linguistic innovation as contagious disease: Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981.

  Reanalysis and language change: Aitchison, 1991; Samuels, 1972; Kiparsky, 1976; Pyles & Algeo, 1982; Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 1991.

  American English: Cassidy, 1985; Bryson, 1990.

  History of English: Jespersen, 1938/1982; Pyles & Algeo, 1982; Aitchison, 1991; Samuels, 1972; Bryson, 1990; Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 1991.

  Apprehending adolescents and catching kids: Williams, 1991.

  The Great Vowel Shift as dudespeak: Burling, 1992.

  Germanic and Indo-European: Pyles & Algeo, 1982; Renfrew, 1987; Crystal, 1987.

  First European farmers: Renfrew, 1987; Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza, 1984; Sokal, Oden, & Wilson, 1991; Roberts, 1992.

  Language families: Comrie, 1990; Crystal, 1987; Ruhlen, 1987; Katzner, 1977.

  Language of the Americas: Greenberg, 1987; Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1988; Diamond, 1990.

  Language lumpers: Wright, 1991; Ross, 1991; Shevoroshkin & Markey, 1986.

  Correlations between genes and language families: Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1988; Cavalli-Sforza, 1991. African Eve: Stringer & Andrews, 1988; Stringer, 1990; Gibbons, 1993.

  Genes and languages in Europe: Harding & Sokal, 1988. Lack of correlation betwe
en language families and genetic groups: Guy, 1992.

  Proto-World: Shevoroshkin, 1990; Wright, 1991; Ross, 1991.

  Language extinctions: Hale et al., 1992.

  Another perspective on language extinctions: Ladefoged, 1992.

  9. Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven

  Infant speech perception: Eimas et al., 1971; Werker, 1991.

  Learning French in utero: Mehler et al., 1988.

  Infants learn phonemes: Kuhl et al., 1992.

  Babbling: Locke, 1992; Petitto & Marentette, 1991.

  Babbling robots: Jordon & Rosenbaum, 1989.

  First words: Clark, 1993; Ingram, 1989.

  Finding word boundaries: Peters, 1983. Children’s examples are from Peters, family memories, Life magazine, and MIT librarian Pat Claffey. The Hill Street Blues example is from Mark Aronoff.

  First word combinations: Braine, 1976; Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Ingram, 1989.

  Infant comprehension: Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1991.

  Speech bottleneck in children: Brown, 1973, p. 205.

  Language blasts off: Ingram, 1989, p. 235; Brown, 1973; Limber, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Bickerton, 1992.

  Adam and Eve: Brown, 1973; MacWhinney, 1991.

  Children avoid tempting errors: Stromswold, 1990.

  Language acquisition across the globe: Slobin, 1985, 1992.

  Alligator goed kerplunk: Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen, & Xu, 1992.

  Don’t giggle me: Bowerman, 1982; Pinker, 1989.

  Wild children: Tartter, 1986; Curtiss, 1989; Rymer, 1993.

  Thurber & White: from “Is Sex Necessary?” Example from Donald Symons.

  Language from television: Ervin-Tripp, 1973. Understanding Motherese from content words: Slobin, 1977. Children as mind-readers: Pinker, 1979, 1984.

  Motherese: Newport, et al., 1977; Fernald, 1992.

  Mute child: Stromswold, 1994.

  No parental feedback: Brown & Hanlon, 1970; Braine, 1971; Morgan & Travis, 1989; Marcus, 1993.

  Learning language without feedback: Pinker, 1979, 1984, 1989; Wexler & Culicover, 1980; Osherson, Stob, & Weinstein, 1985; Berwick, 1985; Marcus et al., 1992.

  Language acquisition close up: Pinker, 1979, 1984; Wexler & Culicover, 1980.