THE opening pages of The Stuff of Thought present the same arguments on the nature of language as Steven Pinker’s earlier book, The Language Instinct. Language and grammar, Pinker says, are hard-wired into our brains. He presents the Chomskian notion that “children must be equipped with an innate universal grammar; a set of plans for the grammatical machinery that powers all human languages”.
According to Pinker and Noam Chomsky’s adherents, children do not learn the particular syntactic processes that characterise the grammar of their native language. Instead, the rules of syntax for every language on Earth lie dormant in…
