Pinker seems to be on the other end of the academic spectrum from the SWH. For those who don't know linguistics, Chomsky was the driving force in modern linguistics. Last week I stumbled across this video, the first 15 minutes or so of such are a pretty good, easy to grasp intro to his ideas on universal grammar and the language faculty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnLWSC5p1XE