Approaching UG from Below
Approaching UG from Below
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从底层走近UG
DOI：
10.1515/9783110207552-001
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发表时间：
2006
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Noam Chomsky
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Noam Chomsky
从语言的古代起源开始，语言的严肃研究实际上就被定义为一个问题，即使只是隐含的问题，那就是确定这种独特的人类财产的具体性质。在50年前开始形成的“生物语言学视角”中，这种关注被转化为确定语言FL能力的遗传禀赋的努力，语言FL被理解为一种“认知器官”，在这种情况下，人类实际上是共享的，并且在关键方面是独一无二的，因此是一种物种属性。因此，语言是我的语言，一种外语状态，普遍语法（UG）被重新解释为外语初始状态的理论。“生物语言学”一词本身是由Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini在1974年创造的，作为他为巴黎的Royaumont研究所和麻省理工学院组织的一次国际会议的主题，汇集了进化生物学家，神经科学家，语言学家，以及其他与语言和生物学有关的人，这是许多这样的倡议之一，在此之前和之后，这些倡议试图探索语言的明显原则在多大程度上是这个认知系统所独有的，正如那里所讨论的，这是“从生物学角度提出的基本问题”之一，在生物语言学的框架内，对简单、优雅等方法的考虑，通常可以被重新定义为关于有机系统的经验命题。例如，莫里斯·哈雷（Morris Halle）反对假定结构主义音位学的语言学水平的经典论点是，它需要无动机的规则冗余，被认为违反了自然的方法论假设。类似地，20世纪50年代关于音系和句法规则系统的有序性和循环性的结论也是合理的，因为它们减少了描述的复杂性，消除了规约。在这种情况下，这些问题可以被重新塑造为形而上学的而不是认识论的：世界是这样运作的吗？然后，这些问题可以进行比较分析，并与更普遍的生物学原理，甚至可能是更基本的原理相关
The problem that has virtually defined the serious study of language since its ancient origins, if only implicitly, is to identify the specific nature of this distinctive human possession. Within the “biolinguistic perspective” that began to take shape fifty years ago, the concern is transmuted into the effort to determine the genetic endowment of the faculty of language FL, understood to be a “cognitive organ,” in this case virtually shared among humans and in crucial respects unique to them, hence a kind of species property. So construed, language is I-language, a state of FL, and universal grammar (UG) is reinterpreted as the theory of the initial state of FL. The term “biolinguistics” itself was coined in 1974 by Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini as the topic for an international conference he organized for the Royaumont Institute in Paris and MIT, bringing together evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and others concerned with language and biology, one of many such initiatives, before and since, which sought to explore the extent to which apparent principles of language are unique to this cognitive system, one of “the basic questions to be asked from the biological point of view,” as discussed there, and crucial for the study of development of language in the individual and its evolution in the species.1 Within the biolinguistic framework, methodological considerations of simplicity, elegance, etc., can often be reframed as empirical theses concerning organic systems generally. For example, Morris Halle’s classical argument against postulating a linguistic level of structuralist phonemics was that it required unmotivated redundancy of rules, taken to be a violation of natural methodological assumptions. Similarly conclusions about ordering and cyclicity of phonological and syntactic rule systems from the 1950s were justified on the methodological grounds that they reduce descriptive complexity and eliminate stipulations. In such cases, the issues can be recast as metaphysical rather than epistemological: Is that how the world works? The issues can then be subjected to comparative analysis and related to principles of biology more generally, and perhaps even more fundamental principles