Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Post Office Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Nature. 2011 May 5;473(7345):79-82. doi: 10.1038/nature09923. Epub 2011 Apr 13.
Languages vary widely but not without limit. The central goal of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and explain the constraints on that diversity. Generative linguists following Chomsky have claimed that linguistic diversity must be constrained by innate parameters that are set as a child learns a language. In contrast, other linguists following Greenberg have claimed that there are statistical tendencies for co-occurrence of traits reflecting universal systems biases, rather than absolute constraints or parametric variation. Here we use computational phylogenetic methods to address the nature of constraints on linguistic diversity in an evolutionary framework. First, contrary to the generative account of parameter setting, we show that the evolution of only a few word-order features of languages are strongly correlated. Second, contrary to the Greenbergian generalizations, we show that most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies. These findings support the view that-at least with respect to word order-cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states.
语言的差异非常大，但并非没有限制。语言学的核心目标是描述人类语言的多样性，并解释这种多样性的限制因素。受乔姆斯基影响的生成语言学家声称，语言多样性必须受到内在参数的限制，这些参数是在儿童学习语言时设定的。相比之下，受格林伯格影响的其他语言学家则声称，在反映普遍系统偏差的特征的共现中存在统计趋势，而不是绝对限制或参数变化。在这里，我们使用计算系统发育方法在进化框架中解决语言多样性的限制性质。首先，与参数设置的生成解释相反，我们表明语言的只有少数语序特征的进化是强烈相关的。其次，与格林伯格的概括相反，我们表明，大多数观察到的特征之间的功能依赖性是谱系特异性的，而不是普遍的趋势。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即——至少就语序而言——文化进化是决定语言结构的主要因素，语言系统的当前状态塑造和限制了未来的状态。
