本期文选来自www.usnews.com上美联社的一篇关于“鸟语”的文章，颇有意思。

Apr 26, 8:51 PM EDT
Songbirds May Be Able to Learn Grammar
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science WriterWASHINGTON (AP) -- The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate¹ between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology² researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics⁴.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt⁵ or otherwise make noise, linguists⁶ have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

 Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed linguist³ Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling⁷ bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk⁸ grammar.

"We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," Gentner said. "It's clear that they can do it."
Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When the bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks⁹; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.

 Gentner said he was so unprepared for the starlings' successful learning that he hadn't bothered to record the songs the starlings sang in response.

"They might have been singing them back," Gentner said.

To put the trained starlings' grammar skills in perspective, Gentner said they don't match up to either of his sons, ages 2 and 9 months.

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive¹⁰ science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, who conducted the tamarin monkey experiment, said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy¹¹ may be shared with other animals."

But Hauser said it still doesn't quite disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Chomsky. The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about.

Hauser said Gentner's study showed him he should have tried to train his monkeys instead of just letting them try to recognize recursive grammar instinctively¹². But starlings may be more apt vocalizers and have a better grasp of language than non-human primates¹³. Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosized into a bug¹⁴ and unable to communicate with the outside world, Hauser suggested.

本期入选长难句

It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

老邪说“渔”

一、读句子的“预见性”，来自于对特殊句型的把握。

句首it takes sb sth to do sth ,就是这句话的核心,可确定句型。在继续阅读下半句之前应该“预见”到将会出现“ to do sth”的具体内容，既是“to get the birds to recognize……”。

二、词的变化和用法。

下半句的“get sb to do sth”出现。一旦读到“get”，作为一个万能动词，并不只作“获得”理解，当看语境即上下文。V. sb to do sth, 大致意思是“让谁干什么”。结构定词义也。

三、其余值得注意的问题

长名词短语University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner，大学修饰研究者，人跟其又是同位语，相当于NOS school teacher YOS.

故本句两层含义分别为：1.……花费了多少时间、做了多少次实验来干什么；2.……来认识鸟最基本的语法。合在一起可译作：……花费了多少时间、做了多少次实验来让鸟认识到鸟类语言最基本的语法。

参考译文：圣地亚哥的加利福尼亚大学心理研究者Tim Gentner 用了一个月时间做了15000次实验，他的实验用食物回报鸟儿，来让鸟类了解它们语言中最基本的语法。