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1.
Human language is both highly diverse-different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals-and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally interesting. I review the literature on linguistic diversity and language universals, suggesting that an adequate notion of 'formal universals' provides a promising way to understand the facts of language acquisition, offering order in the face of the diversity of human languages. Formal universals are cross-linguistic generalizations, often of an abstract or implicational nature. They derive from cognitive capacities to perceive and process particular types of structures and biological constraints upon integration of the multiple systems involved in language. Such formal universals can be understood on the model of a general solution to a set of differential equations; each language is one particular solution. An explicit formal conception of human language that embraces both considerable diversity and underlying biological unity is possible, and fully compatible with modern evolutionary theory.  相似文献   

2.
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour naming patterns, and producing results in quantitative agreement with the experimental data. Here we investigate the role of an individual perceptual bias in the framework of the model. We study how, and to what extent, the structure of the bias influences the corresponding linguistic universal patterns. We show that the cultural history of a group of speakers introduces population-specific constraints that act against the pressure for uniformity arising from the individual bias, and we clarify the interplay between these two forces.  相似文献   

3.
Although there may be no true language universals, it is nonetheless possible to discern several family resemblance patterns across the languages of the world. Recent work on the cultural evolution of language indicates the source of these patterns is unlikely to be an innate universal grammar evolved through biological adaptations for arbitrary linguistic features. Instead, it has been suggested that the patterns of resemblance emerge because language has been shaped by the brain, with individual languages representing different but partially overlapping solutions to the same set of nonlinguistic constraints. Here, we use computational simulations to investigate whether biological adaptation for functional features of language, deriving from cognitive and communicative constraints, may nonetheless be possible alongside rapid cultural evolution. Specifically, we focus on the Baldwin effect as an evolutionary mechanism by which previously learned linguistic features might become innate through natural selection across many generations of language users. The results indicate that cultural evolution of language does not necessarily prevent functional features of language from becoming genetically fixed, thus potentially providing a particularly informative source of constraints on cross-linguistic resemblance patterns.  相似文献   

4.
We examine the process of linguistic adaptation among children of immigrants and the extent to which distinct language types exist between foreign monolingualism and a full transition to English. While complete linguistic assimilation remains the normative outcome and is widely perceived as desirable, we examine alternative theories holding that selective rather than full acculturation is a preferable alternative for immigrant children and their families. For this purpose we contrast effects of fluent bilingualism, indicative of selective acculturation, with other types of linguistic adaptation on various measures of family conflict, solidarity and personality. The data come from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study [CILS], which have been used in several previous studies of the second generation. We use this data-set to test new hypotheses on the interactive effects of parental and children's knowledge of English on family relations and personality outcomes and to examine the effects of gender differences throughout the process. We find that a plurality of second generation linguistic adaptation types exists in reality and that, among them, fluent bilingualism is consistently preferable. Theoretical and policy implications of these and other results are discussed.  相似文献   

5.
The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the most intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emotion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief review. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate the objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this paper is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanesespeaking subjects assign basically similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit cultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language, [emotions, inter-cultural and intra-cultural variability, cultural universals, linguistic relativity, Chinese, Japanese]  相似文献   

6.
Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.  相似文献   

7.
Folk zoological life-form terms, like folk botanical life-form terms (Brown 1977a), are added to languages in a highly regular manner. Life-forms of the triad FISH, BIRD, and SNAKE are lexically encoded first, although in no particular order, followed by WUG (e.g., American English hug) and then MAMMAL. Four general principles of naming-behavior underlie these regularities: (1) criteria clustering; (2) conjunctivity (including binary opposition); (3) dimension salience; and (4) marking. In addition, size of folk zoological life-form vocabularies is positively correlated with societal complexity. This is caused by the decay of folk biological taxonomies as societies become more complex. [cognitive anthropology, ethnobiology, folk classification, language universals, language change]  相似文献   

8.
Croatia has always been a multilingual environment. The influence of German and Italian was empowered through direct political influence. During the second part of the 18th and in the 19th century native speakers of German and Italian used Croatian as a second language carrying out their duties at work. This bilingualism can tentatively be referred to as bureaucratic bilingualism. Native Croatian speakers used Italian and German as a second language in certain social areas. Such bilingualism can tentatively be called civic bilingualism. It can be assumed that starting with the 1960s civic German and Italian bilingualism no longer existed. Language contact within the daily life results in German and Italian loan words in Croatian which are still actively present and used in daily communication.  相似文献   

9.
Objectives: The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin's times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguistics: a refined list of Indo‐European cognate words, and a novel method of language comparison estimating linguistic diversity from a universal inventory of grammatical polymorphisms, and hence enabling comparison even across different families. We corroborated the method and used it to compare patterns of linguistic and genomic variation in Europe. Materials and Methods: Two sets of linguistic distances, lexical and syntactic, were inferred from these data and compared with measures of geographic and genomic distance through a series of matrix correlation tests. Linguistic and genomic trees were also estimated and compared. A method (Treemix) was used to infer migration episodes after the main population splits. Results: We observed significant correlations between genomic and linguistic diversity, the latter inferred from data on both Indo‐European and non‐Indo‐European languages. Contrary to previous observations, on the European scale, language proved a better predictor of genomic differences than geography. Inferred episodes of genetic admixture following the main population splits found convincing correlates also in the linguistic realm. Discussion: These results pave the ground for previously unfeasible cross‐disciplinary analyses at the worldwide scale, encompassing populations of distant language families. Am J Phys Anthropol 157:630–640, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.  相似文献   

10.
The biases of individual language learners act to determine the learnability and cultural stability of languages: learners come to the language learning task with biases which make certain linguistic systems easier to acquire than others. These biases are repeatedly applied during the process of language transmission, and consequently should effect the types of languages we see in human populations. Understanding the cultural evolutionary consequences of particular learning biases is therefore central to understanding the link between language learning in individuals and language universals, common structural properties shared by all the world’s languages. This paper reviews a range of models and experimental studies which show that weak biases in individual learners can have strong effects on the structure of socially learned systems such as language, suggesting that strong universal tendencies in language structure do not require us to postulate strong underlying biases or constraints on language learning. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between learner biases and language design has implications for theories of the evolution of those learning biases: models of gene-culture coevolution suggest that, in situations where a cultural dynamic mediates between properties of individual learners and properties of language in this way, biological evolution is unlikely to lead to the emergence of strong constraints on learning.  相似文献   

11.
Language Ideology: The Case of Spanish in Departments of Foreign Languages   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
In this article we investigate language ideology in a department of Spanish. We are concerned with examining the acquisition and transmission of linguistic culture in departments of foreign languages within university settings and the ways in which views about non-English languages that are part of the American cultural dialogue are maintained and nurtured by educational institutions. Using long-term participant-observation data and focused interviews, we contend that foreign language departments in U.S. colleges and universities, although involved in a nonhegemonic practice—that is, in the teaching of non-English languages—are nevertheless working in concert with deeply held American ideologies about bilingualism and monolingualism.  相似文献   

12.
Language is a hallmark of our species and understanding linguistic diversity is an area of major interest. Genetic factors influencing the cultural transmission of language provide a powerful and elegant explanation for aspects of the present day linguistic diversity and a window into the emergence and evolution of language. In particular, it has recently been proposed that linguistic tone—the usage of voice pitch to convey lexical and grammatical meaning—is biased by two genes involved in brain growth and development, ASPM and Microcephalin. This hypothesis predicts that tone is a stable characteristic of language because of its ‘genetic anchoring’. The present paper tests this prediction using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework applied to a large set of linguistic features and language families, using multiple software implementations, data codings, stability estimations, linguistic classifications and outgroup choices. The results of these different methods and datasets show a large agreement, suggesting that this approach produces reliable estimates of the stability of linguistic data. Moreover, linguistic tone is found to be stable across methods and datasets, providing suggestive support for the hypothesis of genetic influences on its distribution.  相似文献   

13.
Over the past two decades, comparative linguistic anthropological research has disclosed the significance of metadiscourse and metasignaling forthe establishment, maintenance, and transformation of social relations. One type of metasignal-signal relationship has, because of its role in producing sociability, come to seem especially interesting with regard to the evolutionary origins of human language—the type wherein a strategically (and presumably neocortically) induced metasignal is modeled after, but distinct from, an instinctively triggered signal, as in ritualized lamentation. Strategic vocal deceptions in nonhuman primates are possible precursors of true socially constructed, socially shared metasignals, which in turn may be ancestors of modern human language. This article charts an evolutionary path from strategic vocal manipulation, to cultural metasignals, to language, using data from primate studies, discourse-centered research, and early child language acquisition. [Key words: language origins, semiotics, metacommunication, chimpanzees, early language acquisition]  相似文献   

14.
Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However, the mechanisms of biological and cultural evolution are very different: biological traits are passed between generations by genes, while languages and concepts are transmitted through learning. Here we show that these different mechanisms can have the same results, demonstrating that the transmission of frequency distributions over variants of linguistic forms by Bayesian learners is equivalent to the Wright–Fisher model of genetic drift. This simple learning mechanism thus provides a justification for the use of models of genetic drift in studying language evolution. In addition to providing an explicit connection between biological and cultural evolution, this allows us to define a ‘neutral’ model that indicates how languages can change in the absence of selection at the level of linguistic variants. We demonstrate that this neutral model can account for three phenomena: the s-shaped curve of language change, the distribution of word frequencies, and the relationship between word frequencies and extinction rates.  相似文献   

15.
This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic anthropology which underpins the language dynamics of two Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) areas, Ros Muc in Conamara, Co. Galway and Ráth Cairn in Co. Meath. This research highlights what could be considered a socio-linguistic paradox: the community (Ráth Cairn) which engages more vigorously in language maintenance endeavors, and exhibits a greater awareness of language policy and of linguistic ideology among members of the community, fares less favorably in socio-linguistic terms to the contrasting community (Ros Muc) which has to endure a more challenging socio-economic climate than that of Ráth Cairn. The relative socio-economic success of the Ráth Cairn community appears to be masking a greater malaise of socio-cultural fragility and language endangerment. In contrast, the language obsolescence issues faced by the Ros Muc community, though superficially not as severe, are enmeshed in what would be considered more pressing issues of socio-economic marginalization.  相似文献   

16.
Mongolian Ethnicity and Linguistic Anxiety in China   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Language is one of the official criteria of defining a nationality in socialist China, but it simultaneously has been subjected to an "ideology of contempt" by the Chinese regime that builds nationality only to destroy it. This article examines the linguistic anxiety displayed by the Mongols and their controversial language revitalization efforts in a social environment in which they have become an absolute minority even while they have formal autonomy under their name. The tremendous cost—both emotional and economic—at which such language maintenance comes suggests that nationality in China may not be understood as primarily cultural but, instead, as political. As more Mongols lose their language, arguably the last bastion of their "nationality" status, they face the prospect of becoming a deinstitutionalized, depoliticized, and deterritorialized "ethnic group" in a racialized "Chinese Nation." [Keywords: language, nationality, ethnic group, Mongols, Chinese National Multiculturalism]  相似文献   

17.
Brent Berlin's proposed "general principles of classification and nomenclature" are examined as they apply to folk biology in Ndumba, a Papua New Guinea highlands society. Focusing on Ndumba folk zoology, supplemented with a previous analysis of their folk botany, Berlin's analytical schema for ethnobiological classification is supported, but principles of nomenclature in ethnobiology appear to be in need of reconsideration. [ethnosemantics, folk biology, language universals, Papua New Guinea]  相似文献   

18.
Books received     
While theoretical work focusing on immigrant language acculturation suggests that both parental and child's understanding of English are needed to measure acculturation, analysts have instead focused on child bilingualism. I develop a measure of familial acculturation and conceptually distinguish it from child bilingualism. I then determine whether several child and parental variables influence these measures differently, which would provide evidence supporting the conceptual distinction. Results show that child bilingualism is indeed independent of familial acculturation. Parental skills and resources significantly affect familial acculturation but not child bilingualism, whereas gender and Latino status affect child bilingualism but not familial acculturation. Additionally, modes of incorporation do not determine either child bilingualism or familial acculturation, suggesting that integrative forces external to the family may have little power to shape the internal workings that generate child or familial language acculturation. Together, these findings imply that researchers should avoid conflating child bilingualism with familial acculturation.  相似文献   

19.
Recent work in linguistic anthropology highlights the role of linguistic ideologies, or cultural conceptions of language, in transforming social relations and linguistic structure and use. This article examines the links between language attitudes and uses in their institutional and interactional contexts on Rapa Nui, a Polynesian island community that is part of the Chilean nation-state. By the 1970s, a sociolinguistic hierarchy and functional compartmentalization of languages between Spanish and Rapa Nui—what I will describe as "colonial diglossia"—had become established in the community, which was rapidly becoming bilingual. Language shift toward Spanish has continued to advance since then. However, rising Rapa Nui syncretic language practice and consciousness, combined with the political successes of a local indigenous movement and changes in the local economy, are now contributing to the breakdown of colonial diglossia, generating better conditions for the maintenance of the Rapa Nui language.  相似文献   

20.
张恩涛  张积家 《生物磁学》2009,(14):2728-2730
复杂语言结构和简单语言结构相比,哪一种更能促进语言能力提高,是语言心理研究的核心问题。近年来,国外出现大量语言复杂性的研究。本文对语言复杂性的理论、评估、原理及应用作了介绍,并对语言复杂性理论与教学理论的联系以及在应用中需要考虑的问题做了简单评述,旨在对语言学习和语言缺陷治疗提供帮助。  相似文献   

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