Steven Pinker: recommendation

Transcript context

…No shrank and stank. No shrank and stank. Admittedly it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey, I Shrank the Kids instead of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In my style manual, The Sense of Style, I recommend hanging on to them. I think they’re nice. It’s nice to have that three‑way distinction. English conjugation is already so depauperate, so degenerate, that it’s nice to preserve what distinctions we have. Moving chronologically through your career, let me ask you a big‑picture question about language. I come to linguistics very much as an outsider. Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar, which is somehow built into the structures of the human mind: in its early years there seemed to be a promise of some very definite accounting of what that structure would be. After a while it seemed to collapse into this very general idea of recursion, which to me as an economist seems almost tautological. If I came away from this debate and then I read people writing within popular science: “Today language is a number of different capacities brought together. They’re independent and just combined with our ability to divine meaning from others.” Could it be the case that Chomsky’s hypothesis was simply wrong? 2016, I know your books, but what’s your take on that today?…

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