音系范畴是天赋的还是浮现的?

Are phonological categories innate or emergent?

生成音系的音系范畴天赋论一直受到功能主义的质疑,尤其最近越来越多的研究支持浮现论,认为音系范畴不是天赋,而是在通域认知能力与经验的交互中浮现。本文回顾了相关研究,认为它们只是在描述语音范畴的浮现,并不能否定音系范畴的天赋性。音系范畴是音系这一概念系统的概念或心智实体,音系作为计算系统是人的生物属性,作为音系计算符号的范畴也是人类语言天赋。在演化-发育生物学看来,生成音系学理论的构建与以范畴为基础的音系在儿童大脑中的发育本质上是一致的,音系范畴是非基因的后成天赋,它们作为概念实体的本体地位、真实性与其天赋性可以被统一阐释。语音范畴与音系范畴有质的不同,它们是自组织性物理过程的产物,或物理声学参数的统计偏向或集束。浮现论混淆两类范畴,得出音系范畴浮现的错误结论。

The innateness of phonological categories contended by Generative Phonology has long beenquestioned by functionalism. Especially in recent years more and more studies support emergentism with claims that phonological categories are not innate but emergent from the interactions among domain-general cognitive abilities and experiences. This article reviews some of those studies and finds that they merely describe the emergence of phonetic categories and cannot deny the innateness of phonological categories. Phonological categories are conceptual or mental entities in the conceptual system of phonology, which, as a computational system, is a biological feature of humans. Likewise, phonological categories, being signs in phonological computation, are human linguistic endowment. From an Evo-devo biological perspective, the construction of Generative Phonology theory and the development of phonology based on categories in children's brain are essentially identical processes; phonological categories are non-genomic epigenetic nativism, and as conceptual entities, their ontological status, reality and innateness may have a unified interpretation. Phonetic categories are absolutely distinct from phonological ones; they are products of self-organizing physical processes, or statistical distribution bias or clustering of physic-acoustic values. Emergentism confounds these two categories and wrongly concludes that phonological categories are emergent.