Kirkus Reviews QR Code   How the Mind Creates Language  By
Steven Pinker  Pub Date: Feb. 24th, 1994 ISBN: 0061336467
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins  Another in a series of books
(Joel Davis's Mother Tongue, p. 1303; Ray Jackendorf's Patterns
in the Mind, p. 1439) popularizing Chomsky's once controversial
theories explaining the biological basis of language. Variously
mellow, intense, and bemused--but never boring--Pinker
(Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience/MIT), emphasizes
Darwinian theory and defines language as a "biological
adaptation to communicate." While Pinker bases his argument on
the innate nature of language, he situates language in that
transitional area between instinct and learned behavior, between
nature and culture. Starting with what he calls a "grammar
gene," Pinker describes the way primitives, children (his
special interest), even the deaf evolve natural languages
responding to the universal need to communicate. He refutes the
"comic history" of linguistic determinism, the belief