Steven Pinker Discusses the Power of Language

Author: Grace Armstrong

On Wed., April 16, members of the College community filled Dana Auditorium to hear author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Steven Pinker speak on "Language Acquisition." Pinker is the author of several books, including "The Language Instinct," which Scientific American honored as one of the "100 Best Science Books of the Century." For his work, Newsweek named Pinker to its list of "100 Americans for the Next Century," and his speech attracted an audience with interests in everything from linguistics to biology and neuroscience.
Pinker began his talk by having his audience reflect on how often the nature of language is taken for granted. "Language comes so naturally to us that it's easy for us to forget what a miraculous gift it is," he said. "Right now, I have coded ideas into this precise sequence of hisses, squeaks, and pops... somehow, your brain has the ability to decode these noises."
And not only decode them, but form them into complicated, abstract ideas. According to Pinker, there are two aspects to our ability to communicate through "arbitrary" sounds. The first is the memorized word, which stands as a symbol for the actual thing or idea, and the second is grammar.
"The word 'duck' doesn't look, talk or quack like a duck, but it gets you to think of a duck," Pinker said. Of course, he pointed out, "This system only works if everyone has memorized the same words." Knowing a word that no one else knows is pointless.
Pinker also noted that memorized words can only communicate predetermined concepts. This is the reason for combinatorial grammar, the second "trick" of communication.
Grammar provides rules to arrange old words to form new concepts. Pinker, however, said, a system of communication based entirely on rules would have disadvantages, too. This is why "we have words for common activities and grammatical entities for novel concepts."
Next, Pinker spoke on regular and irregular words. This is an area that fascinates linguists, but Pinker managed to explain his subject in a way that even the uninitiated could follow.
"There are only 165 irregular verbs in the English language, and no new ones have been added in the last 100 years," Pinker said. He explained several different theories about why verbs become irregular or regular, but held that the basic rules of memorization and symbol combination (grammar) apply here as well: regular verbs are created using a rule, while irregular verbs are memorized. He cautioned, though, that there was more to the concept.
"As an experimental psychologist, I'm not supposed to believe anything until it's been tested on rats or sophomores," Pinker said. Based on his research, he proposed a modified form of the "words and rules" theory. Basically, he said, each form of an irregular verb is memorized as a separate word, but the memory is partly associative. And people will apply regular patterns when their memory fails.
Pinker pointed out that in English, the 10 verbs that appear most often - including be, have, do, say, make and go - are all irregular. The same is true in many languages. What is the connection between irregularity and frequency of use? To answer that, Pinker described how irregulars are created.
"Irregular forms are fossils of dead rules, rules that once operated but were too hard to memorize," Pinker said. He explained that when the rules get too messy, verbs are memorized as irregular.
Because irregular words are memorized, they can be forgotten. In general, speakers default to regular forms if their memory fails them. This explains why there are so few irregular verbs in the English language. "Over the centuries, common words stayed irregular, and rare ones switched to regular," Pinker stated. If they are used at all, the less frequent irregulars begin to sound strange.
Pinker kept the audience's attention by pointing out a few of the odd word forms in the English language. He had plenty of examples, from slang terms (Why do certain phrases sound so strange in past tense?), to brand names ("Ever since Sony invented the Walkman, people have been unsure of what to call more than one,") to nouns that have become verbs.
With each of these examples, Pinker aimed to prove one of his points. And although the explanation became technical at times, the audience was able to share his fascination with the topic. At the root of his study of words, Pinker said, is "a general interest in how the mind works."
"The same rules that allow us to say that a dog bit a man also allow us to say that the Big Bang created the universe," Pinker said. "This is what I think of as the miracle of language: its vast expressive power."
Pinker's lecture was sponsored by the foreign language division and the C.V. Starr Foundation and co-sponsored by the Psychology Department, the Psychology Club, the Teacher Education Program, the Neuroscience Program and Cook Commons.