Jennifer

International Business Administration 1

Summary of video about
linguistics as a window to understanding the brain by Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In this video, he explores why
language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human
evolution. He also touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how
we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature.
Steven Pinker said that language is one of the fundamental topics in human sciences. It’s the
trait that most conspicuously distinguishes humans from other species. As it is essential to
human cooperation, we accomplish amazing things by sharing our knowledge or coordinating
our actions by means of words. He said that language is central to human life. Language comes
so naturally to us that we’re apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is. You have the
ability to recover the information from that stream of noises allowing us to share ideas.
There are some points he discussed in this video :
1. The Science of Language
There are 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, all of them complex, and no one has ever
discovered a human society that lacks complex language.
2. Components of Linguistics
Linguistics studies about :
 How language works ( Grammar, phonology, semantics, pragmatics), how it is
processed, acquired and computed
3. What Language is :
Language isn’t : Written language ,proper grammar ,and thought
4. The Miracle of Language
5. Why Study Linguistics?
In conclusion, language is distinctive, essential, and mysterious. The scientific study of
language is called linguistics. Language is really at the center of a number of different concerns
of thought, social relationships, human biology, human evolution, that speaks to what’s special
about the human species. Language is the most distinctive human talent. Language is a window
into human nature, and most significantly, the vast expressive power of language is one of the
wonders of the natural world.  Without learning language, people in the world can’t
communicate properly.