Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 78

Linguists, including particularly Anne Senghas (Senghas et al., 1997), had the opportunity (and, I might add, the wit) to look at a remarkable case of a language rising in a hithertofore‐isolated deaf community. These were children in the area of Managua, Nicaragua, brought together in a kind of informal deaf club. The result, as Senghas and her colleagues showed, was a constantly self‐enriching gestural system that in semantics and syntax embodied the elements of known natural languages, spoken and gesture.

I had the opportunity to work with Senghas, Goldin‐Meadow, and [Molly] Flaherty on studies of my favorite abstraction, symmetry (and its entailed cousin, reciprocity), in this population (L.R. Gleitman, S. Goldin‐Meadow, A. Senghas and M. Flaherty, {2019}). This work fed several of my obsessions at the same time. It was a new testbed in which an experience‐deprived user population showed how abstractions like symmetry and reciprocity arise under untutored conditions, and how this delicate formal distinction is reflected in the emerging syntax of their language.

Even the very first user‐inventors of this sign language formally distinguished between symmetrical predication (Juan and Carlos high‐five) and reciprocal predications (Juan and Carlos punch each other). Just like English speakers, these untutored children treat the symmetric predicate high‐five as an intransitive verb, with the conjoined Juan and Carlos viewed as a single collective subject argument whose parts are symmetrically involved in the action. In the Nicaraguan Sign Language equivalent for reciprocal Juan and Carlos punch each other, one finds JUAN CARLOS PUNCH–GET PUNCHED CARLOS JUAN PUNCH–GET PUNCHED, where the serial verb construction PUNCH–GET PUNCHED encodes a transitive action with two animate participants, agent and patient. The reciprocal construction puts two such clauses together, with participant order reversed, describing the two reciprocal events.

Remember, there was no input that accounts for this knowledge. I take this and the many related findings from Nicaraguan Sign Language to be the most compelling evidence for the robustness of the human language learning function to differences in external experience.