罕見的動物，你認識牠們嗎？

亞馬遜角蛙 (Amazon-horned-frog)

紅眼樹蛙 (Red-eyed-tree-frog)

藍色箭毒蛙 (Blue-poison-dart-frog)

黃金箭毒蛙 (Golden-poison-dart-frog)

墨西哥蠑螈 (美西螈) (Axolotl)

雪兔 (Arctic-hare)

非洲食蟻獸 (Aardvark)

藍馬林魚 (Blue-marlin)

駱馬 (Llama)

儒艮 (Dugong)

穿山甲 (Pangolin)

青鳥 (Bluebird)

圖片來源: National Geographic

趣味動物小品

Kawabunga~

Do I love biolinguistics? Let me think about it!

Oh~feel sooooo good!

What?! A cat, not a mat?

I'm a graceful frog prince.

How's my new hair style?

It's a bird. It's an airplane. No~It's a superman!

I am king of the world.

圖片來源: Great aninmals

Preface (paragraph 4 +5 ) T 勝芬

Biological Foundations of Language
By Eric H. Lenneberg

Preface (Paragraph 4+5)

This book attempts to reinstate the concept of the biological basis of language capacities and to make the specific assumptions so explicit that they may be subjected to empirical test. In many instances I have not been able to do more than to formulate questions and to show that they are not spurious. There is no research as yet that provides answers to them. But I hope that I have been able to show what type of investigations might lead to new insights and thus, perhaps, give new directions to old inquiries. A particularly promising approach seems to be the systematic evaluation of patients with various deficits, especially the deaf and the mentally retarded. Modern advances in technology and methodology in behavior research are likely to lead to new knowledge about language function, and thus the patients whose misfortune serves as source material for new studies may, hopefully, eventually profit from the new advances in our understanding of language.

在本書中，我試著重申生物基礎在語言能力中的概念，並嘗試讓可能在觀察性實驗中所證實的特定假說更為明白，有時候，我只能明確的列舉出問題來，並證明它們不是虛構的，但是這些問題目前仍然沒有研究結果。不過我還是希望能告訴大家，哪些研究會為我們帶來新的視野，並可能給予舊有的疑惑一些新的方向，像是系統性的評估有缺陷的患者，尤其是對耳聾和智能障礙的患者，就似乎是一個很被看好的研究領域。現代技術和方法理論的發展，可能會為行為研究帶來語言功能方面的新知，而病患的缺陷可能成為最新研究的素材，希望這些新的發展，最終能幫助我們對語言的了解。



This book must be understood as a discussion rather than a presentation of the biological foundations of language. The exact foundations are still largely unknown. On the other hand, I have considered this common claims relating to the biological nature of language. In those instances where I found myself to be in disagreement with widely held opinions, the argument may have taken on a predominantly iconoclastic character, as, for instance, in Chapter six; in other cases the topic seemed to me important enough to warrant d detailed discussion although the data do not lead to new ideas on the nature or origin of language, as, for example, the discussion of peripheral anatomy in Chapter two. However, both the negative and the positive contributions uniformly led me to quite a specific point of view, which I have attempted to summarize in Chapter nine, and which may, some day in the future, become the foundation to a new theory on language.

本書旨在於探究而非完整呈現語言的生物基礎，這些確切基礎的絕大部分仍然未知。另一方面，我把這本書當成一個很好的機會，來對一些廣泛的生物語言主張，做些批判性的評論。我的論點若和這些主張相左時，我顯然就扮演一種破除因襲的角色，就如同第六章所論述的狀況。另一種情況是，若某個主題對我來說非常重要，但自然層面或語言起源方面的資料都沒有新意時，我仍會仔細討論，例如第二章器官周邊的解剖學。然而，無論是正面或負面的貢獻，均讓我有了獨特的見解，因此我試著在第九章作個總結，或許在未來的語言研究領域之中，能當作另一個新學說的基礎。