In Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994) he discusses various topics related to language acquisition and the mental life of language. He is a vehement follower of the Chomskyan theory of Universal Grammar and the innateness of language hypothesis. According to Pinker the well known assumptions that, “children learn to talk from role models and caregivers,... grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured in schools, but sagging educational standards… have led to a frightening decline in the ability of the average person to construct a grammatical sentence” (1994:18) is entirely false. The main reason that Pinker gives for this position is the fact that, “Language… is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains… which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction” (1994:18) In the following essay I will be supporting Pinker’s claim by firstly discussing some of the terms and theories that I will be using in......
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