Sandler Wendy
Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 29;9:1782. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01782. eCollection 2018.
Taking its cue from sign languages, this paper proposes that the recruitment and composition of body actions provide evidence for key properties of language and its emergence. Adopting the view that compositionality is the fundamental organizing property of language, we show first that actions of the hands, face, head, and torso in sign languages directly reflect linguistic components, and illuminate certain aspects of compositional organization among them that are relevant for all languages, signed and spoken. Studies of emerging sign languages strengthen the approach by showing that the gradual recruitment of bodily articulators for linguistic functions directly maps the way in which a new language increases in complexity and efficiency over time. While compositional communication is almost exclusively restricted to humans, it is not restricted to language. In the spontaneous, intense emotional displays of athletes, different emotional states are correlated with actions of particular face and body features and feature groupings. These findings indicate a much more ancient communicative compositional capacity, and support a paradigm that includes visible body actions in the quest for core linguistic properties and their origins.
本文从手语中获得灵感，提出身体动作的招募和构成可为语言的关键属性及其起源提供证据。我们秉持组合性是语言的基本组织属性这一观点，首先表明手语中手、脸、头和躯干的动作直接反映了语言成分，并阐明了其中与所有语言（手语和口语）相关的组合性组织的某些方面。对新兴手语的研究通过表明为语言功能逐渐招募身体发音器官直接映射了一种新语言随着时间推移在复杂性和效率方面增加的方式，从而强化了这一方法。虽然组合性交流几乎完全局限于人类，但它并不局限于语言。在运动员自发、强烈的情绪表达中，不同的情绪状态与特定面部和身体特征及特征组合的动作相关联。这些发现表明了一种更为古老的交流组合能力，并支持一种在探寻核心语言属性及其起源时将可见身体动作纳入其中的范式。
