語言與心智

前言

　　The first six chapters that follow are from the late 1960s, mostly based on talks for general university audiences, hence relatively informal. The final chapter is from 2004, based on a talk for a general audience. This recent essay reviews the "biolinguistic approach" that has guided this work from its origins half a century ago, some of the important developments of recent decades, and how the general approach looks today - to me at least.　　The dominant approach to questions of language and mind in the 1950s was that of the behavioral sciences. As the term indicates, the object of inquiry was taken to be behavior, or, for linguistics, the products of behavior: perhaps a corpus obtained from informants by the elicitation techniques taught in field methods courses. Linguistic theory consisted of procedures of analysis, primar- ily segmentation and classification, designed to organize a body of linguistic material, guided by limited assumptions about structural properties and their arrangement. The prominent linguist Martin Joos hardly exaggerated in a 1955 exposition when he identified the "decisive direction" of contemporary struc- tural linguistics as the decision that language can be "described without any preexistent scheme of what a language must be." Prevailing approaches in the behavioral sciences generally were not very different. Of course, no one accepted the incoherent notion of a "blank slate." But it was common to sup- pose that beyond some initial delimitation of properties detected in the environ- ment （a "quality space," in the framework of the highly influential philosopher W. V. O. Quine）, general learning mechanisms of some kind should suffice to account for what organisms, including humans, know and do. Genetic endow- ment in these domains would not be expected to reach much beyond something like that.

內(nèi)容概要

　　This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky' s outstanding collection of essays on　　Language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky' s influential approach into the twenty-first century.　　Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically-endowed, biological system （Universal Grammar）, the rules and principles of which we acquire as internalized knowledge （I-language）. Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the "biolinguistic" approach that has guided Chomsky' s work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.

書籍目錄

Preface to the third editionPreface to the second editionPreface to the first edition1 Linguistic contributions to the study of mind: past2 Linguistic contributions to the study of mind: present3 Linguistic contributions to the study of mind: future4 Form and meaning in natural languages5 The formal nature of language6 Linguistics and philosophy7 Biolinguistics and the human capacityIndex

章節(jié)摘錄

　　One difficulty in the psychological sciences lies in the familiarity of the phenomena with which they deal. A certain intellectual effort is required to see how such phenomena can pose serious problems or call for intricate explanatory theories. One is inclined to take them for granted as necessary or somehow "natural."　　The effects of this familiarity of phenomena have often been discussed. Wolfgang K6hler, for example, has suggested that psychologists do not open up "entirely new territories" in the manner of the natural sciences, "simply because man was acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology.., because at the very beginning of their work there were no entirely unknown mental facts left which they could have discovered."1 The most elementary discoveries of classical physics have a certain shock value man has no intuition about elliptical orbits or the gravitational constant. But "mental facts" of even a much deeper sort cannot be "discovered" by the psychologist, because they are a matter of intuitive acquaintance and, once pointed out, are obvious.　　There is also a more subtle effect. Phenomena can be so familiar that we really do not see them at all, a matter that has been much discussed by literary theorists and philosophers. For example, Viktor Shldovskij in the early 1920s developed the idea that the function of poetic art is that of "making strange" the object depicted. "People living at the seashore grow so accustomed to the murmur of the waves that they never hear it. By the same token, we scarcely ever hear the words which we utter... We look at each other, but we do not see each other any more. Our perception of the world has withered away; what has remained is mere recognition." Thus, the goal of the artist is to transfer what is depicted to the "sphere of new perception"; as an example, Shklovskij cites a story by Tolstoy in which social customs and institutions are "made strange" by the device of presenting them from the viewpoint of a narrator who happens to be a horse.

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