ABSTRACT
Skinner's book Verbal Behavior is very long, and extremely boring to read, partly because of ugly and unnecessary neologisms like 'mands', 'tacts' and 'autoclitics' and 'intraverbals'. Although any babies who could not imitate speech would be at a crippling disadvantage in language acquisition, imitation is certainly not the whole story, as Skinner himself observed. What Skinner in fact wrote was that all these different functional units exist, and that they and the process of assembling units into phrases and sentences depend upon 'the environment' and 'the verbal community'. The big problem for Skinner is that he vacillates between leaving everything outside in the environment - as he would like to - and putting things inside the head of the learner - as he finds he has to. Skinner's application of his ideas to the problems of society at large are almost completely worthless.
