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Part C
Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the
underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on
ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points)
Since the days of
Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the
scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines
science. Newton’s laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of
different phenomena into a single explicatory framework.
(46) In
physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and
seeks a theory of everything—a single generative equation for all we see. It
is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification,
given the dimensions and universes that it might entail. Nonetheless, unification
of sorts remains a major goal.
This tendency in the natural sciences has long been
evident in the social sciences too. (47) Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share
common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could
also be traced to more constrained beginnings. Just as the bewildering
variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual
selection, perhaps the world’s languages, music, social and religious customs
and even history are governed by universal features. (48) To filter out what is unique from what is shared might
enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior arose and what guides it
in evolutionary or cognitive terms.
That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of
linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray
at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of
grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in
language.
The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam
Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language-acquisition
capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then
sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is
why children can learn it so quickly.
(49) The second,
by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality,
identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many languages, which
are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints.
Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by
examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000
languages. (50) Chomsky’s
grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the
family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenbergian
universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of
word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the
analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lineage-specific
and not governed by universals. [418 words]
Part
C
46.在物理学领域，一种做法把这种寻求大同理论的冲动推向极端，试图寻找包含一切的理论——一个涵括我们所看到的一切的生成性公式。
47.这里，达尔文学说似乎做出了证明，因为如果人类有着共同的起源，那么似乎就有理由认为文化的多样性也可以追溯到更为有限的起源。
48.从共有特征中滤出独有特征，这使我们得以理解复杂的文化行为是如何产生的，并从进化或认知角度理解什么引导了它的走向。
49.第二次努力——由乔舒亚·格林堡做出——采用更为经验主义的方法来研究语言的普遍性，确定了多种语言（尤其在语法词序方面）的共有特征，这些特征被认为是代表了由认知限制产生的倾向。
50.乔姆斯基的语法应该显示出语言变化的模式，这些模式并不受语言谱系或贯穿谱系路径的影响；而格林堡式的普遍性则预言了特定的语法词序关系类型之间所存在的紧密互依性。
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