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Daniel Everett and the Pirahã language | ||
Tags: Rare Languages | Book | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 5801 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 17 of 22 29 October 2012 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Are there any good written articles on this? I find listening to podcasts to be very
time-consuming. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 22 30 October 2012 at 11:10am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes it is that documentary. The passages I referred to are found here: 25.35: the claimed absence of recursion (including the interview with Chomsky) around 38.40 you see the passage with the half empty auditorium caused by the boycot by the socalled linguistic institute of the university of Brasilia (Everett was invited by the Institute for the study of indigenous languages) 40.20: Everett's message in Pirahã for the tribe from 47.30: the analysis of possible ways to analyse 1000 sentences in the language using a computer at MIT 47.45: the conclusion of the empirical analysis: "Ok, so we finished analyzing our corpus of around 1000 sentences and the answer is as Dan was hypothethizing: let's say, we don't have evidence of recursion in this.. The simplest second (?) say is: In our analysis of this corpus there is no clear evidence for recursive structures." 49.05: Chomskys final denial: "that method of testing grammars had had no successes so we can dismiss it (...) there is no question that the language is based on a recursive procedure" Well, the results of this succesful application the method didn't succeed in making Chomsky change his opinion. But maybe that would be too much to expect. ---- In the preceding messages you'll find a number of references to written sources, including the article at Chronicle.com which give a good summary of the debate. See also the answer from David Pesetsky, who was one of the authors of an article against Everett's hypothesis - Everett's answer is here. Another article from Everett here The title of the latter is "Cultural constraints on grammar in Pirahã". I'm personally not quite happy about this angle - if the idea about universal grammar is shaky then the idea of narrow ties between culture and language is downright impossible to prove. After all many tribes in the Amazonas area have lived lives like that of the Pirahã, but apparently they used languages with recursion. The simple question remains: is there recursion or not in the language of the Pirahã - the cultural aspects are interesting, but they don't settle the discussion. And Chomsky? I do believe he started out as a sincere and groundbreaking theoretical linguist in the fifties, but even back then he was too quick to jump to the conclusion that his own transformational model was not only possible, but the ONLY possible model for scientifically based grammars. But actually he only dealt seriously with one extreme case, name a grammar based on the end-to-end analysis of sentences. He simply never gave any coherent reason to drop field/constituent structure grammars. And the avalanche of later transformational theories which he has proposed up to this day makes it clear that a purely transformational paradigm runs into severe problems - including something as basic as the level where semantics enter the game. But for some reason - which could include Chomsky's political activities in the sixties, which might appeal to some - he became a guru in American linguistics, and it is never healthy for a science to base itself on the whims of one man. When I studied Romance languages (etc.) in the seventies it was already clear that North America was lost for valuable practical linguistics - linguistics there had for all practical purposes degenerated into scholastic attempts to use transformational analysis on quirks in the English language. And the situation there and in the rest of the world is apparently still the same - there is a sharp division between the theoretical linguists who are sitting in their ivory towers and the supposedly unscientific people who actually do the practical tasks which we as language learners depend on. Edited by Iversen on 30 October 2012 at 12:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| anamsc2 Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4353 days ago 85 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan, German Studies: French | Message 19 of 22 30 October 2012 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
1. Pirahã is NOT the only language without recursion. There are other languages that are much more well-studied that have significant constraints on recursion or that lack it altogether. 2. It really is a shame that no one but Everett really knows anything about Pirahã, because nobody can come up with their own examples; we have to trust his. Even so, if recursion is what we want to latch onto, it really is not clear from Everett's examples (which are the only examples to go by) that there is no recursion in the language. 3. At the end of the day, I think this is an example of extreme exoticization. Pirahã's "strange" features that people latched onto back in the day (lack of colors, numbers, recursion, etc.) are frankly not unheard of in other languages.
Um, maybe this was the case in the 70s, but I can tell you it is not now. As someone who has been involved in linguistics in the US, I know that there are plently of excellent, scholarly programs here, and Chomsky is not the be-all and end-all. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5626 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 20 of 22 30 October 2012 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Can you give us some examples? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 5801 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 21 of 22 30 October 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I found this excellent "meaty" article on the New Yorker site:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_ colapinto 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Eumaeus Groupie Australia Joined 5398 days ago 75 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 22 of 22 23 January 2013 at 7:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure if this can be accessed outside of Australia, but The Grammar of Happiness will be available on ABC tv
iview for the next two weeks. Try this, www.abc.net.au/iview. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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