The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind

Language and Literature 1996 5 (1) 71-77 © Addison Wesley Longman Ltd 1996 0961-9470/96/05107071/S03-50 There still seem to be widespread misconceptions as to what linguistics actually is. Auberon Waugh writing in The Independent a few years ago claimed, while ’never, perhaps, a tremendously useful discipline at the best of times’ linguistics had been ’reduced by Chomsky and his disciples to a positively mind-boggling level of stupidity and insignificance. If ever Mrs Thatcher wants an excuse to close down a university, she has only to look at its departments of linguistics’. There are probably many working within the broad field of language studies descriptive linguists, applied linguists, stylisticians who also do not see the point of theoretical linguistics. Given these sentiments and the current depressing political climate of cut-backs and shut-downs, the discipline of linguistics has been hard put to justify its existence in some British universities over recent years. It is particularly pleasing, then, that Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, a book which sets out to explain recent developments and central issues in ’the science of language’, should be approaching the top of the bestseller lists. Any book of this kind and scope is bound to cause controversy among linguists, as The Langtrage Instinct has indeed done. But its chief value lies in its ability to convey to a wider audience, in a witty and accessible style, the importance and intellectual excitement of linguistic theory. I will provide a brief outline of the issues Pinker covers and the arguments he advances. I will then suggest why readers of Language and Literature (especially those with an interest in (literary) style) should find these issues and arguments of particular relevance. ’