One of the books we will be reading this semester is Steven Pinker's most recent work, The Stuff of Thought. Pinker, a noted psycholinguist, made the transition into the mainstream media with his book The Language Instinct, and has continued to present ideas from the fields of linguistics and psychology in ways that capture the imagination of the reading public. He is probably most known for his theory that although language per se may not be innate, the mechanism for generating and utilizing the rules of language may be.
For a summary of his work, watch Pinker's TED Talk, an 18 minute perusal of his most recent book. You can also view Pinker's demonstration of the Wug Test by watching his Scientific American Frontiers segment Born to Talk.