摘要
递归是语言的本质,它能区别人类语言和动物的交际形式。这是自《句法结构》(1957)起的所有Chomsky著作中一个始终不变的主题,并在2002年被重申为“唯递归假说”,进一步强调递归是语言的“唯一”本质,从而将递归在语言中的地位提高到一个前所未有的高度。递归和语言的关系也就成为当今语言学领域一个最炙热的话题。研究者纷纷从不同领域、不同视角来支持或反对“唯递归假说”,争议极其热烈,至今没有定论。因此,递归和语言的关系将继续成为本世纪语言学和其他相关学科的重要研究课题。本文较全面和细致地探讨了以下两个方面的问题:其一,以往研究者是如何界定递归概念的?有哪些争议?其二,以往研究者又是如何用实证方法来证实或证伪“唯递归假说”的?各自存在哪些不足或问题?最后,在前人研究的基础上总结了未来相关研究大致可以从哪些方面入手。
Recursion is the essence of human language and can distinguish language from any other form of animal communication.This has been a continuing idea of Chomsky's works since his Syntactic Structures(1957),and reiterated in Hauser,et al.(2002)as the Recursion-Only Hypothesis(ROH),emphasizing that the“sole”essence of language is recursion,which is exclusive to languages,innate and brought to human beings by gene mutation in evolution.ROH lifted the status of recursion in language to an unprecedented height.Since then,ROH,as one of the hottest frontier topic,has frequently been approved or contested in different fields of research,and,however,no unanimous conclusion has been reached yet.All these suggest that the relation between language and recursion will deserve more than a little attention in the 21st century.The research project on the recursion-language relation will continue to be significant in linguistics as well as in other related disciplines like neuropsychology,animal cognition,neural networks,etc.The paper mainly probes into the following two aspects of questions in a detailed and elaborate way:On the one hand,what were the controversial definitions of recursion,especially the recursion in ROH in the literature?What were the problems in all these definitions?On the other hand,how did the researchers testify or falsify ROH with experiments?What were the problems in their experimental studies?The conclusion of the paper puts forwards some proposals that may allow the following two questions to be assessed more effectively:What is the exact definition of recursion in ROH?And how could we conduct research on ROH in a better way in the future?
作者
杨彩梅
YANG Caimei(School of Foreign Languages,Soochow University,1 Shizi Jie,Gusu District,Suzhou City,Jiangsu Province 215006)
出处
《当代语言学》
CSSCI
北大核心
2020年第4期601-621,共21页
Contemporary Linguistics
基金
国家社科基金项目“唯递归假说的心理语言学实证研究”(15BYY070)的资助。
关键词
“唯递归假说”
递归
语言
the Recursion-Only Hypothesis
recursion
language
