Corballis Michael C
School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2019 Jul 4;13:217. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00217. eCollection 2019.
Language could not exist without memory, in all its forms: working memory for sequential production and understanding, implicit memory for grammatical rules, semantic memory for knowledge, and episodic memory for communicating personal experience. Episodic memory is part of a more general capacity for mental travel both forward and backward in time, and extending even into fantasy and stories. I argue that the generativity of mental time travel underlies the generativity of language itself, and could be the basis of what Chomsky calls I-language, or universal grammar (UG), a capacity for recursive thought independent of communicative language itself. Whereas Chomsky proposed that I-language evolved in a single step well after the emergence of , I suggest that generative imagination, extended in space and time, has a long evolutionary history, and that it was the capacity to share internal thoughts, rather than the nature of the thoughts themselves, that more clearly distinguishes humans from other species.
如果没有各种形式的记忆，语言就不可能存在：用于序列生成和理解的工作记忆、用于语法规则的隐性记忆、用于知识的语义记忆以及用于交流个人经历的情景记忆。情景记忆是一种更普遍的心理时间旅行能力的一部分，这种能力可以在时间上向前和向后延伸，甚至可以延伸到幻想和故事中。我认为，心理时间旅行的生成性是语言本身生成性的基础，并且可能是乔姆斯基所称的I语言或普遍语法（UG）的基础，即一种独立于交际语言本身的递归思维能力。乔姆斯基提出I语言是在语言出现后很久才一步进化而来的，而我认为，在空间和时间上扩展的生成性想象有着悠久的进化历史，并且正是分享内心想法的能力，而非想法本身的性质，更清楚地将人类与其他物种区分开来。
