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54-671: Pinker criticizes a number of common ideas about language, for example that children must be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that the kind of linguistic facilities that a language provides (for example, some languages have words to describe light and dark, but no words for colors) has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis ), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language (see Great ape language ). Pinker sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by evolution to solve

108-411: A critical period in childhood for language development just as there is a critical period for vision development in cats. Much of the book refers to Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar , a meta-grammar into which all human languages fit. Pinker explains that a universal grammar represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general rules of other humans' speech, such as whether

162-422: A "grammar" in the sense that most linguists use, particularly as they are prescriptive in intent rather than descriptive . Constructed languages (also called planned languages or conlangs ) are more common in the modern-day, although still extremely uncommon compared to natural languages. Many have been designed to aid human communication (for example, naturalistic Interlingua , schematic Esperanto , and

216-427: A crude "me Tarzan, you Jane" pointing system. Language (speech) also develops in the absence of formal instruction or active attempts by parents to correct children's grammar. These signs suggest that rather than being a human invention, language is an innate human ability. Pinker also distinguishes language from humans' general reasoning ability, emphasizing that it is not simply a mark of advanced intelligence but rather

270-517: A discipline in Hellenism from the 3rd century BC forward with authors such as Rhyanus and Aristarchus of Samothrace . The oldest known grammar handbook is the Art of Grammar ( Τέχνη Γραμματική ), a succinct guide to speaking and writing clearly and effectively, written by the ancient Greek scholar Dionysius Thrax ( c.  170  – c.  90 BC ), a student of Aristarchus of Samothrace who founded

324-435: A discrepancy between contemporary usage and that which has been accepted, over time, as being standard or "correct". Linguists tend to view prescriptive grammar as having little justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes, although style guides may give useful advice about standard language employment based on descriptions of usage in contemporary writings of the same language. Linguistic prescriptions also form part of

378-418: A distinct Montenegrin standard is a matter of controversy, some treat Montenegrin as a separate standard lect, and some think that it should be considered another form of Serbian. Norwegian has two standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk , the choice between which is subject to controversy : Each Norwegian municipality can either declare one as its official language or it can remain "language neutral". Nynorsk

432-465: A grammar, or as a grammar book . A reference work describing the grammar of a language is called a reference grammar or simply a grammar . A fully revealed grammar, which describes the grammatical constructions of a particular speech type in great detail is called descriptive grammar. This kind of linguistic description contrasts with linguistic prescription , a plan to marginalize some constructions while codifying others, either absolutely or in

486-497: A language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. At smaller scales, it may refer to rules shared by smaller groups of speakers. A description, study, or analysis of such rules may also be known as

540-554: A progressive model for the social sciences requires evolutionarily-informed models of nature-nurture interactionism, grounded in the computational theory of mind . Tooby and Cosmides refer to this new model as the integrated model (IM). Tooby and Cosmides provide several comparisons between the SSSM and the IM, including the following: Richardson (2007) argues that, as proponents of evolutionary psychology (EP), evolutionary psychologists developed

594-410: A school (attached to a cathedral or monastery) that teaches Latin grammar to future priests and monks. It originally referred to a school that taught students how to read, scan, interpret, and declaim Greek and Latin poets (including Homer, Virgil, Euripides, and others). These should not be mistaken for the related, albeit distinct, modern British grammar schools. A standard language is a dialect that

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648-616: A school on the Greek island of Rhodes. Dionysius Thrax's grammar book remained the primary grammar textbook for Greek schoolboys until as late as the twelfth century AD. The Romans based their grammatical writings on it and its basic format remains the basis for grammar guides in many languages even today. Latin grammar developed by following Greek models from the 1st century BC, due to the work of authors such as Orbilius Pupillus , Remmius Palaemon , Marcus Valerius Probus , Verrius Flaccus , and Aemilius Asper . The grammar of Irish originated in

702-422: A set of prescriptive norms only, excluding the aspects of a language's grammar which do not change or are clearly acceptable (or not) without the need for discussions. The word grammar is derived from Greek γραμματικὴ τέχνη ( grammatikḕ téchnē ), which means "art of letters", from γράμμα ( grámma ), "letter", itself from γράφειν ( gráphein ), "to draw, to write". The same Greek root also appears in

756-479: A specialized "mental module". He distinguishes the linguist's notion of grammar, such as the placement of adjectives, from formal rules such as those in the American English writing style guide . He argues that because rules like " a preposition is not a proper word to end a sentence with " must be explicitly taught, they are irrelevant to actual communication and should be ignored. Pinker attempts to trace

810-452: A standard defining nationality or ethnicity . Recently, efforts have begun to update grammar instruction in primary and secondary education. The main focus has been to prevent the use of outdated prescriptive rules in favor of setting norms based on earlier descriptive research and to change perceptions about the relative "correctness" of prescribed standard forms in comparison to non-standard dialects. A series of metastudies have found that

864-413: Is a danger that they will be treated by others as science. Webster believes that such speculations strengthen supporters of extreme genetic determinism . Grammar In linguistics , grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses , phrases , and words . The term may also refer to

918-421: Is backed by 27 percent of municipalities. The main language used in primary schools, chosen by referendum within the local school district, normally follows the official language of its municipality. Standard German emerged from the standardized chancellery use of High German in the 16th and 17th centuries. Until about 1800, it was almost exclusively a written language, but now it is so widely spoken that most of

972-493: Is based on the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo ( Rioplatense Spanish ). Portuguese has, for now, two official standards , Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese . The Serbian variant of Serbo-Croatian is likewise divided; Serbia and the Republika Srpska of Bosnia and Herzegovina use their own distinct normative subvarieties, with differences in yat reflexes. The existence and codification of

1026-614: Is directly based on Classical Arabic , the language of the Qur'an . The Hindustani language has two standards, Hindi and Urdu . In the United States, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar designated 4 March as National Grammar Day in 2008. Standard social science model The term standard social science model ( SSSM ) was first introduced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in

1080-461: Is no such thing as a language instinct; however, he acknowledges that Pinker represents a widely held view of language acquisition. Richard Webster , writes in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), and concludes that Pinker argues cogently that the human capacity for language is part of the genetic endowment associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised neural networks within

1134-403: Is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. For example, Chinese and Afrikaans are highly analytic, thus meaning is very context-dependent. (Both have some inflections, and both have had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.) Latin , which is highly synthetic , uses affixes and inflections to convey

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1188-399: Is promoted above other dialects in writing, education, and, broadly speaking, in the public sphere; it contrasts with vernacular dialects , which may be the objects of study in academic, descriptive linguistics but which are rarely taught prescriptively. The standardized " first language " taught in primary education may be subject to political controversy because it may sometimes establish

1242-588: The First Grammatical Treatise , but became influential only in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In 1486, Antonio de Nebrija published Las introduciones Latinas contrapuesto el romance al Latin , and the first Spanish grammar , Gramática de la lengua castellana , in 1492. During the 16th-century Italian Renaissance , the Questione della lingua was the discussion on the status and ideal form of

1296-616: The 12th century, compares the Hebrew language with Arabic in the Islamic grammatical tradition . Belonging to the trivium of the seven liberal arts , grammar was taught as a core discipline throughout the Middle Ages , following the influence of authors from Late Antiquity , such as Priscian . Treatment of vernaculars began gradually during the High Middle Ages , with isolated works such as

1350-429: The 16th century onward, such as Grammatica o Arte de la Lengua General de Los Indios de Los Reynos del Perú (1560), a Quechua grammar by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás . From the latter part of the 18th century, grammar came to be understood as a subfield of the emerging discipline of modern linguistics. The Deutsche Grammatik of Jacob Grimm was first published in the 1810s. The Comparative Grammar of Franz Bopp ,

1404-433: The 1920s as "completely untenable". In his argument, Sampson cites British education policies in the 20th century that were guided by social scientists and which were based on the belief that children had in-built talents and needs. Thus, he challenges Pinker's assertion that the view of the mind among all social scientists is a tabula rasa . Moreover, Sampson only conditionally agrees that the scientists Pinker associates with

1458-422: The 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind . They used SSSM as a reference to social science philosophies related to the blank slate , relativism , social constructionism , and cultural determinism . They argue that those philosophies, capsulized within SSSM, formed the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development of the social sciences during the 20th century. According to their proposed SSSM paradigm,

1512-596: The 7th century with Auraicept na n-Éces . Arabic grammar emerged with Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali in the 7th century. The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appeared in the High Middle Ages , in the context of Midrash (exegesis of the Hebrew Bible ). The Karaite tradition originated in Abbasid Baghdad . The Diqduq (10th century) is one of the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Ibn Barun in

1566-450: The Italian language, initiated by Dante 's de vulgari eloquentia ( Pietro Bembo , Prose della volgar lingua Venice 1525). The first grammar of Slovene was written in 1583 by Adam Bohorič , and Grammatica Germanicae Linguae , the first grammar of German, was published in 1578. Grammars of some languages began to be compiled for the purposes of evangelism and Bible translation from

1620-465: The SSSM as a rhetorical technique : "The basic move is evident in Cosmides and Tooby's most aggressive brief for evolutionary psychology. They want us to accept a dichotomy between what they call the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) and the "Integrated Causal Model" (ICM) they favor ... it offers a false dichotomy between a manifestly untenable view and their own." Wallace (2010) has also suggested

1674-524: The SSSM to be a false dichotomy and claims that "scientists in the EP tradition wildly overstate the influence and longevity of what they call the Standard Social Science Model (essentially, behaviorism ) of human cognition". Geoffrey Sampson argues that the SSSM is based on a straw man . He views Pinker's claim that the SSSM has been the dominant theoretical paradigm in the social sciences since

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1728-440: The SSSM, such as Skinner, Watson, and Mead, were influential, stating, "to identify them as responsible for the general tone of intellectual life for eighty years seems comical". Similarly, Neil Levy appears to concur with Sampson's straw man thesis regarding the conception of the SSSM, against which evolutionary psychologists direct much of their criticism. Levy writes: "No-one—not even Skinner and his followers—has ever believed in

1782-446: The advent of written representations , formal rules about language usage tend to appear also, although such rules tend to describe writing conventions more accurately than conventions of speech. Formal grammars are codifications of usage which are developed by repeated documentation and observation over time. As rules are established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often produces

1836-415: The allegation of SSSM is based on a straw man or rhetorical technique . Steven Pinker names several prominent social scientists as proponents of the standard social science model, including John B. Watson , Margaret Mead , Franz Boas , B. F. Skinner , Richard Lewontin , John Money , and Stephen Jay Gould . The authors of The Adapted Mind have argued that the SSSM is now out of date and that

1890-504: The blank slate of Pinker's title." Hilary Rose has criticized Tooby and Cosmides' arbitrary exclusion of economics and political science from their SSSM model, which Rose argues is "rather like excluding physiology and biochemistry from an account of the life sciences". She also states that Tooby and Cosmides have publicly indicted sociologists and anthropologists of inappropriate separatist behavior towards other academic disciplines while ignoring their newer efforts that demonstrate

1944-504: The brain, and that its attack on the ' standard social science model ' of human nature is effective. Webster accepts Pinker's argument that, for ideological motives, twentieth-century social scientists have minimized the extent to which human nature is influenced by genetics. However, Webster finds Pinker's speculation about other specialized neural networks that may have evolved within the human brain—such as "intuitive mechanics" and "intuitive biology"—to be questionable, and believes that there

1998-493: The complete opposite. Rose notes how sociologists and anthropologists have many new developments that involve study of the natural sciences and technology. Furthermore, Rose suggests that Tooby and Cosmides' characterization of scientists like Gould, Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin as SSSM adherents is based on an inaccurate reading of works like The Mismeasure of Man and Not in Our Genes , two books that have explored

2052-418: The explanation for variation in speech, particularly variation in the speech of an individual speaker (for example, why some speakers say "I didn't do nothing", some say "I didn't do anything", and some say one or the other depending on social context). The formal study of grammar is an important part of children's schooling from a young age through advanced learning , though the rules taught in schools are not

2106-475: The explicit teaching of grammatical parts of speech and syntax has little or no effect on the improvement of student writing quality in elementary school, middle school or high school; other methods of writing instruction had far greater positive effect, including strategy instruction, collaborative writing, summary writing, process instruction, sentence combining and inquiry projects. The preeminence of Parisian French has reigned largely unchallenged throughout

2160-693: The former German dialects are nearly extinct. Standard Chinese has official status as the standard spoken form of the Chinese language in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (ROC), and the Republic of Singapore . Pronunciation of Standard Chinese is based on the local accent of Mandarin Chinese from Luanping, Chengde in Hebei Province near Beijing, while grammar and syntax are based on modern vernacular written Chinese . Modern Standard Arabic

2214-416: The framework of a standard language . The word grammar often has divergent meanings when used in contexts outside linguistics. It may be used more broadly as to include orthographic conventions of written language such as spelling and punctuation, which are not typically considered as part of grammar by linguists, the conventions used for writing a language. It may also be used more narrowly to refer to

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2268-416: The highly logical Lojban ). Each of these languages has its own grammar. Syntax refers to the linguistic structure above the word level (for example, how sentences are formed) – though without taking into account intonation , which is the domain of phonology. Morphology, by contrast, refers to the structure at and below the word level (for example, how compound words are formed), but above

2322-454: The history of modern French literature. Standard Italian is based on the speech of Florence rather than the capital because of its influence on early literature. Likewise, standard Spanish is not based on the speech of Madrid but on that of educated speakers from more northern areas such as Castile and León (see Gramática de la lengua castellana ). In Argentina and Uruguay the Spanish standard

2376-449: The interplay between biology and the environment. Simon Hampton (2004) contends that evolutionary psychologists' account of the SSSM misses the debate on the existence of psychological instincts in the early part of the 20th century. He argues: psychological and behavioural thinkers have for long periods been immersed in the implications of Darwinism. It is plainly and factually incorrect for evolutionary psychology to deny this. And it

2430-402: The level of individual sounds, which, like intonation, are in the domain of phonology. However, no clear line can be drawn between syntax and morphology. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded by inflection in synthetic languages . In other words, word order is not significant, and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology

2484-480: The local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain. Pinker's assumptions about the innateness of language have been challenged; English linguist Geoffrey Sampson argues that there

2538-510: The mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture. After establishing SSSM, Tooby and Cosmides make a case for replacing SSSM with the integrated model (IM), also known as the integrated causal model (ICM), which melds cultural and biological theories for the development of the mind. Supporters of SSSM include those who feel the term was conceived as a point of argument in support of ICM specifically and evolutionary psychology (EP) in general. There are criticisms that

2592-487: The outlines of the language instinct by citing his own studies of language acquisition in children, and the works of many other linguists and psychologists in multiple fields, as well as numerous examples from popular culture. He notes, for instance, that specific types of brain damage cause specific impairments of language such as Broca's aphasia or Wernicke's aphasia , that specific types of grammatical construction are especially hard to understand, and that there seems to be

2646-418: The same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not totally) self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements that are arranged almost arbitrarily. Latin has a complex affixation and simple syntax, whereas Chinese has the opposite. Prescriptive grammar is taught in primary and secondary school. The term "grammar school" historically referred to

2700-486: The specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares language to other species' specialized adaptations such as spiders ' web-weaving or beavers ' dam-building behavior, calling all three " instincts ". By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are. While only some human cultures possess these technologies , all cultures possess language. As further evidence for

2754-649: The starting point of modern comparative linguistics , came out in 1833. Frameworks of grammar which seek to give a precise scientific theory of the syntactic rules of grammar and their function have been developed in theoretical linguistics . Other frameworks are based on an innate " universal grammar ", an idea developed by Noam Chomsky . In such models, the object is placed into the verb phrase. The most prominent biologically oriented theories are: Parse trees are commonly used by such frameworks to depict their rules. There are various alternative schemes for some grammar: Grammars evolve through usage . Historically, with

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2808-538: The study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology , morphology , and syntax , together with phonetics , semantics , and pragmatics . There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar . Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or instruction . Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning

2862-442: The universality of language, Pinker—mainly relying on the work of Derek Bickerton —notes that children spontaneously invent a consistent grammatical speech (a creole ) even if they grow up among a mixed-culture population speaking an informal trade pidgin with no consistent rules. Deaf babies "babble" with their hands as others normally do with voice, and spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar rather than

2916-540: The words graphics , grapheme , and photograph . The first systematic grammar of Sanskrit originated in Iron Age India , with Yaska (6th century BC), Pāṇini (6th–5th century BC ) and his commentators Pingala ( c.  200 BC ), Katyayana , and Patanjali (2nd century BC). Tolkāppiyam , the earliest Tamil grammar, is mostly dated to before the 5th century AD. The Babylonians also made some early attempts at language description. Grammar appeared as

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