How Could Language Have Evolved?
How Could Language Have Evolved?
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
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发表时间：
2014-08-01
期刊：
影响因子：
9.8
通讯作者：
Berwick, Robert C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bolhuis, Johan J.;Tattersall, Ian;Berwick, Robert C.
语言能力的进化在很大程度上仍然是一个谜。在这篇文章中，我们问为什么。语言的进化分析是复杂的，因为它在任何非人类物种中都没有等价物。关于语言“表现型”的本质也没有达成共识。根据“强最简命题”，语言的关键区别特征（也是进化论必须解释的）是层次句法结构。从进化的角度来看，语言能力很可能是最近才出现的，大约在70，000 - 100，000年前，从那时起似乎就没有经历过修改，尽管个别语言当然会随着时间的推移而发生变化，在这个基本框架内运行。最近出现的语言和它的稳定性都与强最简命题相一致，强最简命题的核心是一个单一的可重复操作，它只需要两个句法元素a和B，并将它们组合成集合{a，B}。
The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000-100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.