Chinese Grammar and Bio-Cognitive Bases of Human Language
汉语语法与生物认知基础
James H-Y Tai 戴浩一

Abstract 摘要
Human language is innate and biologically determined, insofar as chimpanzees and other primates cannot be taught to use human language (Wallman 1992). The issue at stake in contemporary linguistic and psychological theories is whether there is a language-specific faculty in our brain/mind that is modularized and independent of other cognitive abilities of human being. Or, can language faculty be derived from human’s perceptual and general cognitive categories, memory capacity, processing strategies, and conversational structures between hearer and speaker? In other words, the issue centers around whether or to what extent Chomsky’s ‘innateness hypotheses’ is necessary for explaining patterns of human language.

For natives, Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis is necessary in order to explain language universal and learnability in child language acquisition. In Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), both principles of universals (formal as well as substantive), which dictate forms of possible human language, and parameter, which permit variation intra-language or cross-linguistically, are genetically endowed by the language-specific faculty in the human brain/mind. Furthermore, the innateness of UG serves as a metatheory for child language acquisition, in explaining the remarkable rapidity with which the child acquires language despite impoverished input from the adult language. The input data for the child is impoverished because it contains only grammatical sentences of the adult language (the positive data), and little information about ungrammatical sentences (the negative data).

Alternative modes of explanations for language universals have been offered. These include semantic explanations, discourse-pragmatic explanations, processing explanations, and perceptual and cognitive explanations (cf. Hawkins 1988). The negative evidence problem in child language acquisition has been reexamined by Arbib and Hill (1988) and Bowerman (1988), and the results suggest that the complexity in child language acquisition cannot be solved merely by reference to innate UG. Hence, with respect to language universals and learnability, UG does not have as great explanatory value as nativists claim.

The innateness hypothesis also hinges upon the observation that grammatical patterns are not random, and that grammatical rules are structure-dependent. From the point of view of information science, the non-randomness of linguistic structure is a fundamentally important property of human language so that there are possible and impossible patterns of linguistic structures. Chomsky attributes the non-randomness and structure-dependence of human language to the innate language-specific faculty, and excludes the possibility of deriving linguistic patterns from human’s conceptual structures of the physical world. The emphasis of the autonomy of grammar is to underscore the plausibility of the innateness hypothesis. The autonomy thesis maintains that linguistic structures are self-contained and cannot be shaped by human’s experience and conceptualization of the physical world. This autonomy thesis, as pointed out in Tai (1993), has roots in the arbitrariness principle initiated by Saussure and passed on to American structuralists, from Bloomfield to Harris, and on to Chomsky.

In this paper, it will be observed that Chinese grammar is, to a great extent, not arbitrary, and not autonomous from human’s conceptualization of the physical world. The paper focuses on three important role in Chinese grammar, namely: (1) space and time, (2) categorization, and (3) iconicity. They will be highlighted in the following sections.