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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

机译：语言通用性的神话：语言多样性及其对认知科学的重要性

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Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.rnLinguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.
机译：语言通用性的讨论给认知科学家以印象，即语言都是按照共同的模式构建的。实际上，直接意义上几乎没有什么语言通用性可以被所有语言都展现出来。相反，几乎可以在语言组织的每个层次上找到多样性。从认知科学的角度来看，这从根本上改变了探究的对象。这篇目标文章总结了打字员和描述性语言学家数十年来的跨语言工作，表明一旦我们诚实地面对世界六千至八千种语言为我们提供的多样性，语言的普遍特征就寥寥无几。在考察了“通用”的各种用法之后，我们说明了语言在声音，含义和句法组织方面的根本变化，然后我们更详细地研究了递归，选区和语法关系的核心语法机制。尽管组织中​​存在重要的循环模式，但可以将其更好地解释为满足多种设计约束的稳定工程解决方案，既反映了文化历史因素又反映了人类认知的约束。然后语言多样性成为认知科学的关键数据：我们是唯一的通讯系统从根本上来说在各个级别上都是可变的物种。认识到人类语言中结构多样性的真实程度，为认知科学家开辟了令人兴奋的新研究方向，提供了由不同语言提供的数千种自然实验，为与涉及变化和多样性的生物学范式进行对话提供了新的机遇，并与我们面对着挑战。最高的人类技能非凡的可塑性。

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