The Language Instinct, Chapter 12

Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nest are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an "error"? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer, anyway? -370

To a linguist or a psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. -370

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. -372

. . . since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. -374

One of the major discorveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word--noun, verb, adjective--is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental catagory that can be verified by experimental assays, just as chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. -394

Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. -396

[A quote from Dwight Bollinger]
In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, otehrs with a rich fund of practical knowledge--whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn. We are living in an African village and Albert Schweitzer has not arrived yet. -399

Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks of writing well. -401