Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain - Steven Pinker

A good read and an excellent antidote to Pinker is Vyvyan Evans, "The Language Myth. Why language is not an instinct. C.U.P. 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-61975-3. Evans stresses the continuity between human language and communication systems of (certain) animals (e.g. some animals have forms of recursion in their communication), reinterprets many linguistic universals as general cognitive human abilities, and frames language as cultural intelligence, stressing the massive diversity of languages as they co-evolved with cultural and ecological conditions of speech communities. As usual the truth will be somewhere in the good, old middle between universalism and relativism.......