Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct is a good popularization. Caveats: Pinker diverges from Chomsky on a lot of things, but he makes it fairly plain what's

Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct is a good popularization. Caveats: Pinker diverges from Chomsky on a lot of things, but he makes it fairly plain what's his and what is Chomsky. Pinker also gets a bad rap (unfairly in my opinion) of being a retrograde right-winger, because of his association with evolutionary psychology.