Nowak Martin A, Komarova Natalia L, Niyogi Partha
Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
Nature. 2002 Jun 6;417(6889):611-7. doi: 10.1038/nature00771.
Language is our legacy. It is the main evolutionary contribution of humans, and perhaps the most interesting trait that has emerged in the past 500 million years. Understanding how darwinian evolution gives rise to human language requires the integration of formal language theory, learning theory and evolutionary dynamics. Formal language theory provides a mathematical description of language and grammar. Learning theory formalizes the task of language acquisition it can be shown that no procedure can learn an unrestricted set of languages. Universal grammar specifies the restricted set of languages learnable by the human brain. Evolutionary dynamics can be formulated to describe the cultural evolution of language and the biological evolution of universal grammar.
语言是我们的遗产。它是人类主要的进化贡献，或许也是过去五亿年里出现的最有趣的特征。理解达尔文式进化如何产生人类语言需要将形式语言理论、学习理论和进化动力学结合起来。形式语言理论提供了对语言和语法的数学描述。学习理论将语言习得任务形式化——可以证明，没有任何程序能够学习一组不受限制的语言。普遍语法规定了人类大脑能够学习的受限语言集。进化动力学可以被公式化，以描述语言的文化进化和普遍语法的生物进化。
