Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian experimental

psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a

Harvard College Professor. Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and
psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape
recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular
phenomena in language and the neural bases of words and grammar. In his popular
books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an "instinct", an innate
behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He
is the author of six books for a general audience. Pinker has been named as one of
the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards
from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the
Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist
Association. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on
the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public
debates on science and society.
In this TED talk, Pinker starts speaking about how the language evolves. He
says that people not only change their language because of an academy, but
because from human minds interacting from one other. One of the technical
problems of the language is which verb goes in which construction. There is a
tempting generalization that the construction subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient
can also be expressed like subject-verb-recipient-thing. But they are some
exceptions, depending on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of
possession change. This is important because of two things: there's a level of finegrained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute
every time we produce or utter a sentence; and because all of the constructions in
English are used not only literally, but in an almost metaphorical way. Another thing
is the ability to conceive a given event in two different ways, such as "cause
something to go to someone" and "causing someone to have something," and is a
fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for most human
argumentation. There are some relationship types that govern human social
interaction, and are understood by everyone. They can be negotiated, stretched and
extended. Mismatches of these relationships can take to awkward situations.
There is a relation between what we have been studying and what Pinker
says. He concludes his talk declaring that: Language is a collective human
creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to
one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of
language, we can get a window onto what makes us impulse