The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This line from the fragments of the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus (7th-century b. c.) was borrowed by Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) as a metaphor describing the deepest difference for writers and thinkers. Assuming that linguists are thinkers, some linguists could act like the fox, focusing on a comprehensive collection of many things, while other linguists could behave like the hedgehog, focusing on a systematic arrangement of a few gathered objects. A hedgehog linguist like Noam Chomsky prefers to look at the grammar of a language as a system whose huge collection of sentences are unified by a very small set of rules or principles with their associate parameters (P & P). By contrast, a fox linguist like Adele Goldberg (200... (查看原文)
2 有用 知心姐姐卢先生 2017-02-20 20:51:15
谢信一在P&P or Q&Q？一文中将Chomsky和Goldenberg比作刺猬和狐狸，肿么看肿么觉得这个metaphor怪怪的（话说这本书不是写给王老爷子看的吗，囧）