2019年经济学人 约翰逊语言专栏--语言的无限(2)（在线收听）

The second claim is that language is innate, not merely an extension of general human intelligence. Fascinating evidence comes from children who are deprived of it. Deaf pupils at a school in Nicaragua, having never shared a language with anyone before, created a grammatically ornate sign language on their own. A few deaf children in a Mexican family devised a rich sign system with complex grammatical features found in spoken tongues: in their “homesign”, nouns are preceded by a “classifier”, a sign indicating their type, just as they sometimes are in Chinese. It seems the human mind simply cannot help but deal in grammar.

第二种观点认为语言是与生俱来的，而不仅仅是一般人类智力的延伸。有趣的证据来自于那些缺乏这种能力的孩子。尼加拉瓜一所学校的失聪学生以前从未与任何人分享过一种语言，他们自己创造了一种语法华丽的手语。墨西哥一个家庭的几个聋哑儿童设计了一个丰富的手语系统，具有口语中复杂的语法特征：在他们的“homesign”中，名词前面有一个“classifier”，这是一个标志，表示他们的类型，就像他们有时在汉语中一样。人类的大脑似乎就是忍不住要处理语法问题。

A more controversial claim is that all human languages share what Mr Chomsky calls “universal grammar”. This proposition has taken some hard knocks. Whether recursion is universal, for example, is contested. In 2009 two linguists published a widely cited paper called “The myth of language universals”, which seemed to find exceptions to other putatively universal rules. The paper said it was not even clear that all the world’s languages observed a noun-verb distinction; Mr Adger counters with evidence that even the supposed outliers pay some attention to this split.

更有争议的说法是，所有人类语言都有乔姆斯基所说的“通用语法”。这个提议遭到了一些沉重的打击。例如，递归是否普遍存在争议。2009年，两位语言学家发表了一篇被广泛引用的论文，名为《语言普遍性的神话》。这篇论文称，甚至不清楚世界上所有的语言是否都存在名词和动词的区别；阿杰反驳称，有证据表明，即便是所谓的异常值，也对这种分化有所关注。

Many of the universals that hold up best are negative. There are many sensible things languages could do, but don’t. Notably, their grammars do not make use of “continuous” features, such as the length of vowels. For instance, a past-tense verb could be pronounced for a longer time to indicate how long ago the action occurred—perfectly logical, but no language does this. Syntax uses discrete units, not continuous ones. Whether this is proof of universality is a matter of opinion.

许多最能站得住脚的普遍性都是负面的。语言可以做很多看起来合理的事情，但是没有做。值得注意的是，他们的语法没有使用“连续的”特征，比如元音的长度。例如，过去时态动词可以发音更长的时间来表示动作发生的时间——完全符合逻辑，但是没有语言能做到这一点。语法使用离散单元，而不是连续单元。这是否证明普遍性是一个意见问题。

Lastly, Mr Adger embraces the latest of Mr Chomsky’s theories, “Merge”, a mental function in which two units may be joined to a larger one that can then be operated on by the mind’s grammar processor. The two-year-old who beat Kanzi could Merge “water and lighter” and apply the verb to both; Kanzi seemed to treat words like beads on a string, rather than mentally grouping them into bigger units in a structure.

最后，阿杰接受了乔姆斯基最新的理论——“合并”。“合并”是一种心理功能，两个单元可以连接到一个更大的单元上，然后由大脑的语法处理器进行操作。打败Kanzi的两岁孩子可以把“水和打火机”结合起来，并把动词用在两者上；Kanzi似乎把单词当作串在弦上的珠子，而不是在心里把它们分成一个结构中的更大的单元。

Mr Chom sky thinks a single human developed the ability to perform Merge tens of thousands of years ago, and that this is the only feature unique to human language. Mr Adger does not explicitly defend either of these claims. But his tour of Chomskyan linguistics is entertaining and accessible—in contrast to Mr Chomsky’s own notoriously baffling prose. His book is a handy introduction to a vexed debate on the infinite power of the finite mortal mind.

乔姆?斯基认为，人类在数万年前就有了融合的能力，这是人类语言唯一的特点。阿杰并未明确为上述两种说法中的任何一种辩护。但是他对乔姆斯基语言学的游历是有趣且通俗易懂的，这与乔姆斯基先生臭名昭著的令人困惑的散文形成鲜明对比。他的书方便地介绍了一场关于有限的凡人心灵的无限力量的争论。