Functional Styles. Афанасьева Н.Р - 6 стр.

was born. Now called "cognitive science," it combines tools from           the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities
psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neuro-          to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some
biology to explain the workings of human intelligence. The science         cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty,
of language, in particular, has seen spectacular advances in the           a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I
years since. There are many phenomena of language that we                  prefer the admittedly quaint term “instinct”. It conveys the idea
are coming to understand nearly as well as we understand                   that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders
how a camera works or what the spleen is for. I hope to commu-             know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some
nicate these exciting discoveries, some of them as elegant as any-         unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right
thing in modern science, but I have another agenda as well.                education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construc-
                                                                           tion trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spi-
       3. The recent illumination of linguistic abilities has revolu-
                                                                           der brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to
tionary implications for our understanding of language and its role
                                                                           succeed. Although there are differences between webs and words, I
in human affairs, and for our view of humanity itself. Most edu-
                                                                           will encourage you to see language in this way, for it helps to make
cated people already have opinions about language. They know
                                                                           sense of the phenomena we will explore.
that it is man's most important cultural invention, the quintessen-
tial example of his capacity to use symbols, and a biologically un-               5. Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular
precedented event irrevocably separating him from other animals.           wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the
They know that language pervades thought, with different lan-              humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural in-
guages causing their speakers to construe reality in different ways.       vention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general
They know that children learn to talk from role models and caregivers.     capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old, we shall see, is a gram-
They know that grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured in the       matical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious
schools, but sagging educational standards and the debasements of          iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics
popular culture have led to a frightening decline in the ability of the    curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to
average person to construct a grammatical sentence. They also know         Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering
that English is a zany, logic-defying tongue, in which one drives on a     the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent
parkway and parks in a driveway, plays at a recital and recites at a       ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the
play. They know that English spelling takes such wackiness to even         animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using
greater heights – George Bernard Shaw complained that fish could           Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of
just as sensibly be spelled ghoti (gh as in tough, о as in women, ti       miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the
as in nation) – and I that only institutional inertia prevents the adop-   time of day and year. In nature's talent show we are simply a spe-
tion of a more rational, spell-it-like-it-sounds system.                   cies of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating infor-
                                                                           mation about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we
       4. In the pages that follow, I will try to convince you that
                                                                           make when we exhale.
every one of these common opinions is wrong! And they are all
wrong for a single reason. Language is not a cultural artifact that we            6. Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable
learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government          essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to com-
works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our     municate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an
brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the    insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not. Moreover,
child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction,       seeing language as one of nature's engineering marvels – an organ
is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively    with "that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which justly

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