Innateness and Language 8

§§2.2-2.5 discuss the main arguments used by Chomsky and others to support this ‘nativist’ view that what makes language acquisition possible is the fact that much of our linguistic knowledge is unlearned; it is innate or inborn, part of the initial state of the language faculty.^[2] Section 3 presents a number of other avenues of research that have been argued to bear on the innateness of language, and shows how recent empirical research about language learning and the brain may challenge the nativist position. Because much of this material is very new, and because my conclusions (many of which are tentative) are highly controversial, more references to the empirical literature than are normal in an encyclopedia article are included. The reader is encouraged to follow up on the research cited and assess the plausibility of linguistic nativism for him or herself: whether language is innate or not is, after all, an empirical issue.

2. Terminological Note: In this article, I will use ‘innate’ and ‘inborn’ as synonyms; such usage is typical in the literature on linguistic nativism. As many have pointed out, however, these terms cannot generally be treated as synonymous in the philosophical literature on innateness (See, e.g., Cowie, 1999, chs.1-3; Elmanetal., 1996; Griffiths, 2002; Wimsatt, 1999.

在第2-2到2-5的部分,討論喬姆斯基的主要論證, 還有支持「在地的語用者」的觀點。支持這個觀點的主張會認為, 使得語言知識被獲得的可能是指, 有眾多的語言學知識是未被學習到的；這個知識是先天的或事先驗的,先天的部分指的是語言的能力(註二)。第三章有許多正在被討論的觀點,這些觀點是一些找尋天賦語言的進路,而且它們展現進棋友一些經驗上研究學習語言和大腦的相關事項, 也許直接挑戰了在地語用者的觀點。這些研究非常的新,而我們的結論(也許只是直覺)又非常具有爭議性,更多是指向經驗證據勝過心理學文章的結論。鼓勵讀者多參照引用的研究和語言學研究「在地語用者」的研究,無論他或是她的語言是否為天賦的,都是一篇經驗的文獻。

註二,專業術語: 在這篇文章,「天賦」和「天生」是同義的。就像許多觀點一樣,這兩個詞不能在其他哲學的文獻和語言學的文獻中被同樣地看待。(例如寇溫,1999,chs1-3,艾蒙特,1996, 紀費斯,2002,溫斯特,1999。)