图 书 馆
语言的演变Evolution of language |
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| 课程网址: | http://videolectures.net/bzid2010_szathmary_eol/ |
| 主讲教师: | Eörs Szathmáry |
| 开课单位: | 洛兰大学 |
| 开课时间: | 2010-11-22 |
| 课程语种: | 英语 |
| 中文简介: |  |
| 课程简介: | It is difficult to gain an understanding of language since we do not know how it is processed in the brain. Many areas of the human brain are involved in language- related activities, including syntactic operations. Aspects of the language faculty have significant heritability. There seems to have been positive selection for enhanced linguistic ability in our evolutionary past, even if most implied genes are unlikely to affect only the language faculty. Complex theory of mind, teaching, understanding of cause and effect, tool making, imitation, complex cooperation, accurate motor control, shared intentionality, and language together form a synergistic adaptive suite in the human race. Some crucial intermediate phenotypes, such as analogical inference, could have played an important role in several of these capacities. Pleiotropic effects may have accelerated, rather than retarded, evolution. In particular, it is plausible that genes changed during evolution so as to render the human brain more proficient in linguistic processing. Natural language is a fascinating phenomenon, and it is undoubtedly partly biological. Apes, dolphins, and parrots, unlike humans, are unable to acquire language by learning, no matter how hard they try. There must be something in our genetic endowment that makes humans “ready” for language. Some people think that this readiness is simply due to higher intelligence. Although this may be true in a very broad sense, such claims do not explain how this intelligence differs from that of, say, apes. Humans seem to have gained an insight into the cause and effect in the physical domain, and we are able to produce and use tools by the so-called subassembly strategy. To us it seems that humans possess a few neural procedural capacities that are shared by several important faculties, and that these exist only in very rudimentary forms in other animals. One such procedural element is the ability to handle hierarchical structures efficiently: in the language domain, this is the recursive element of syntax; in the tool-making domain, this is the subassembly strategy; in the theory of mind domain, this is second-, third-, and fourth-order intentionality. We propose that over the past ca. 5 million years, there has been selection on several different capacities in the hominine lineage; these capacities are partly overlapping, and the intensity of selection most likely shifted (perhaps several times) over these domains. There could have been a period during which tool use and tool making were primarily favoured, but then the positively selected genetic variants could well have turned out to be favourable in some of the other critical domains. |
| 关 键 词: | 语言演变; 心智理论; 人脑对语言的处理; 自然语言; 遗传因素 |
| 课程来源: | 视频讲座网 |
| 最后编审: | 2019-10-22：cwx |
| 阅读次数: | 55 |