Pinker Explains Language

"After a tough week of school, why don't we say 'This week really bit? Or bited? Or bitted?'" quipped author Steven Pinker during his talk last night at the Graduate School of Education.

Pinker, who is also the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, used examples like this to illustrate his beliefs about language acquisition and to promote his new book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. The event was sponsored by the Askwith Education Forum and Wordsworth Books.

Addressing a standing-room only crowd, Pinker explained the origins of children's grammatical mistakes, the etymology of irregular verbs and why, for example, people say "slept" instead of "sleeped." His sprinkling of uncommon and incorrect forms of words throughout the talk, such as "smote," "clove" and "cleaved," elicited bursts of laughter from his audience.

Students in Science B-29: Human Behavioral Biology read about Pinker's research in the course sourcebook. His findings about the development of language and behavior are seen as revolutionary advances in the fields.

Pinker told the audience about his research which shows that both memory and grammatical rules contribute to the expressive power of language. While his references to arcane events in grammatical history, such as the "Great Vowel Shift of the 15th Century," might have been lost on the audience, many students praised the professor for his incisive comments and analysis.

"I loved his use of comic strips to help illustrate his points," said Julianne A. Lombardo '03. "His overhead presentation really helped to clarify his reasoning. I was hoping that he would talk more about the history of language."

Pinker focused on the reasons that children make errors as they learn a language.

"Language comes so easily to us, we tend to forget how complex it is," Pinker said. He analyzed in detail the reasons that irregular verbs exist and the differences between English and other languages in an attempt to explain the origins of the "vast expressive power of language."

Ever wonder why we say that a baseball player "flied out to center" instead of "flew out to center"? Pinker explained that the meaning of the word 'fly' has changed as the word changed from a verb to the noun 'fly ball' and then back to a verb. Over that transformation, the suffix for the past tense has also changed.

Using the complexity of the German language to prove his assertions, Pinker argued that both the rules of grammar and the rote memorization of words play essential roles in the development of language.

While children use the rules of conjugation to create the correct forms of all regular verbs, he argued, they must memorize the forms of all irregular verbs. The most common irregular verbs, such as "be," "go" and "have," are never regularized because they are so common.

Pinker conceded that although change in the English language and the function of words is inevitable, he said that some degenerative transformations "ought to be resisted on aesthetic grounds."