Author's Preface
Translator's Preface

Chapter 1.
Language is an instinct
Chapter 2.
chatterbox
Chapter 3.
Mental language
Chapter 4.
How Language Works
Chapter 5.
Word, word, word
Chapter 6.
The sound of silence
Chapter 7.
Talking Heads
Chapter 8.
tower of Babel
Chapter 9.
The Birth of a Talking Baby - Talking about Heaven
Chapter 10.
Language organs and grammar genes
Chapter 11.
Big Bang
Chapter 12.
language expert
Chapter 13.
Blueprint of the mind

main
References
Glossary

Steven Pinker's refreshing and lively linguistics!
Language is instinct!

A representative work by the greatest linguist since Chomsky!

If you were to name the greatest linguist of the 20th century, everyone would name Noam Chomsky.
If you were to ask who the greatest linguist since Chomsky is, everyone would name Steven Pinker.
But from a reader's perspective, there is a crucial difference between Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.
Chomsky is notoriously difficult to understand, even among scholars and students.
But pinker is easy.
Even if it is the United States where high-quality non-fiction sells well, would it be reasonable to say that this book, "Language Instinct," sold as well as "The Secret" did in our country?
In fact, if I say that "Language Instinct" is an easy book, Korean readers might not believe me.
That's because almost all the examples in this book are in English.
Of course, it is not because the subject of this book is 'English instinct', but simply because Steven Pinker took English, his native language, as the subject of analysis.

Despite his position in linguistics, the huge success of The Language Instinct, and his ongoing interest in linguistics, Steven Pinker is often called an "evolutionary psychologist" or a "cognitive scientist" rather than a linguist.
Perhaps it is because he stands at the center of the great academic debate surrounding 'human evolution'. The 'genetics-culture' debate is famous, with Richard Dawkins, famous for 'The Selfish Gene', and Daniel Dennett, author of 'Darwin's Dangerous Ideas', on one side, and Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewandowski, and Noam Chomsky on the other.
This was a question of whether uniquely human characteristics such as language, music, and art were seen as byproducts of the enlarged human brain or as adaptations for survival according to the theory of natural selection.
Since then, this debate has branched out into various branches and is still raging today, with the famous 'nature vs. nurture' debate being part of that larger debate.
Evolutionary psychologists, including Steven Pinker, have taken up one of the main roles in this new debate. "The Language Instinct" attempts to prove that language is a product of "evolutionary adaptation" by declaring that "language is instinct."
Steven Pinker may be a bit late to the game, but his name is slowly becoming known in our country.
One of his representative works, "The Blank Slate," has been published, and another, "How the Mind Works," has been published by Dongnyok Science. With the publication of these three works, including "The Language Instinct," along with works by Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould, it is expected that a full-fledged discussion surrounding the "new anthropology" will become possible in Korea as well.


Challenging academic and general public understanding of language!

There are more than one or two things I'm curious about about language.

1. Why do all the remotest peoples on Earth possess language? Why do even those with Stone Age cultures possess languages ​​so complex that they rival those of any advanced nation?
2. Why is it so difficult to learn a foreign language as an adult?
3. Why do all languages ​​where the object comes after the verb, like English, put prepositions before nouns, but all languages ​​where the object comes after the verb, like Korean and Japanese, put particles after nouns?
4. Why do we say ‘here and there’, ‘here and there’, ‘North and South Korea’, and not ‘there and there’, ‘there and here’, ‘North and South Korea’?
5. Why is it said 'flied-out' instead of 'flown-out' when a batter who hits a fly ball is put out?
6. Why is Canada's famous ice hockey team called 'Maple-Leafs' and not 'Maple-Leaves'?
7. Why is it that when a house is swarming with rats, we say "rat-infested" instead of "rats-infested"? And why is it that in the same situation, we say "mice-infested" instead of "mouse-infested"?

One really surprising fact.
A survey was conducted in the United States to determine the frequency of use of ungrammatical language among people from various social classes.
The result was a conference that brought together America's finest minds.
The most highly educated societies were the hotbeds of the most ungrammatical language.
It is often feared that children's language skills are being disrupted by a lack of quality popular culture and education.
Yet the language of street-level black teenagers, who received the lowest levels of education and were most exposed to the toxic effects of popular culture, was remarkably grammatical.
Ironically, education actually served as a factor that hindered the natural use of grammatical language.


One more surprising fact.
Hawaii's sugarcane plantations were filled with workers speaking a variety of languages, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino.
They used a language that was barely a language at all (pidgin) by haphazardly mixing together English words used by farm owners and farm supervisors to communicate with each other.
However, the next generation of children who grew up hearing their language created a separate language with its own perfect grammar system.
Children invented language.


Steven Pinker covers syntax and morphology, and breaks down language into sentences, clauses, phrases, words, morphological units, and phonemes, giving us a clear picture of the whole picture.
And by showing that these elements are common to all languages, he proves that language unfolds according to a universal grammar that is input into our brains according to the instructions of grammar genes.


In the introduction, he writes, “Spiders’ web-making is not the invention of some genius spider, nor does it require proper education or an aptitude for architecture or construction.
Spiders have a spider brain, and this brain motivates them to spin their webs and makes them obsessively stick to it.
“That is why spiders spin webs,” he writes.
Just as it is instinctive for a spider to spin a web, it is instinctive for humans to develop language.