Daniel L. Everett

Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã

The Pirah language challenges simplistic application of Hocketts nearly universally accepted design features of human language by showing that some of these features (interchangeability, displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained. In particular, Pirah culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors. This constraint explains a number of very surprising features of Pirah grammar and culture: the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification, the absence of color terms, the absence of embedding, the simplest pronoun inventory known, the absence of relative tenses, the simplest kinship system yet documented, the absence of creation myths and fiction, the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past, the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures documented, and the fact that the Pirah are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the TupiGuaranispeaking Kawahiv.

Logical form : from GB to minimalism

Acknowledgments. List of Abbreviations. 1. An Introduction. 2. Motivating LF. 3. More on LF. 4. Some Minimalist Background. 5. Antecedent Contained Deletion. 6. Linking, Binding and Weak Cross Over. 7. Superiority Effects. 8. Quantifier Scope. 9. Revisiting the Minimalist Program. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

The Status of Phonetic Rarities

Most sounds can be described in terms of a standard set of phonological features, or in terms of values of well-known phonetic parameters. But some languages, particularly the smaller endangered languages of the world, also contain many unusual sounds that test our traditional descriptive theories. An example is the dental plosive followed by a bilabial trill, found in the Chapakuran languages. We suggest that there is a set (with fuzzy boundaries) of more common sounds that participate in a wide range of general linguistic processes and another set of rarer sounds that have been observed in only one or two languages.

Phonetic Rarities in Pirahã

Piraha is interesting from both a phonetic and a phonological perspective. While possessing an apparently simple phonemic inventory (consisting of eight consonants, three vowels and two tones) it demonstrates a great deal of variation at the phonetic level. It is the purpose of this paper to document two phonetic rarities in Piraha, one of which, [i] has been recorded for no other language, to the knowledge of the present writer.

Phonetic Structures of Banawá, an Endangered Language

This paper describes the phonetic characteristics of Banawa, an endangered language spoken in Brazil. The qualities of the Banawa vowels are described in terms of their formant frequencies. The places of articulation of each consonant, the voice onset time and the manner of articulation are documented. The structure of syllables and words is delimited, and the location of stressed syllables is described and verified experimentally.

Pirahã clitic doubling

Thanks to the following people for helpful comments on one or more of the various versions of this paper: Mark Baker, Adriana Belletti, Noam Chomsky, Des Derbyshire, Charlotte Galves, Ken Hale, Ellen Kaisse, Sam Mchombo, Carlos Quicoli, and Luigi Rizzi. Special thanks go to Osvaldo Jaeggli for a number of helpful criticisms and to Alfredo Hurtado for listening and arguing. I also acknowledge the patient help of Frank Heny, Joan Maling, and anonymous NLLT reviewers for forcing me to write more clearly.The writing of this paper was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and Grant BNS 8405996 from the National Science Foundation.As the final version of this paper was nearing completion, I was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of my dear friend and esteemed colleague, Alfredo Hurtado. Alfredos personal and intellectual encouragement while we were Visiting Scholars at M.I.T. in 1984–1985 was a major factor in my decision to publish this paper, which I dedicate to his memory.

What does Pirahã grammar have to teach us about human language and the mind

Pirahã is a language isolate of the Brazilian Amazon. Among the lessons it has to teach us about human language and the mind, two are highlighted here. The first is that recursion is not a necessary condition for human syntax, because there is no evidence for recursive sentential syntax in the language. This is a stark counterexample to the claims of Chomsky and others. The second lesson is that the influence of culture on Pirahã grammar, coupled with much established and newer research, indicates that the idea of an innate, universal grammar has little if any role to play in our understanding of the nature, origins, and use of human language. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1195 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Iambic Feet in Paumari and the Theory of Foot Structure

This paper analyzes stress and moraic constituencies in Paumari, an endangered language of the Arawan family of the Brazilian Amazon. It argues that Paumari feet are quantity-insensitive iambs, built from right-to-left within the prosodic word. Both of these latter claims are theoretically important because they violate some proposed universals of foot structure. The paper also discusses more general implications of the Paumari data for theories of foot size and shape, proposing two constraints on foot size, Foot Maximality and Foot Minimality, to replace the less fine-tuned constraint Foot Binarity.

An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind1

This paper argues against the hypothesis of a “phonological mind” advanced by Berent. It establishes that there is no evidence that phonology is innate and that, in fact, the simplest hypothesis seems to be that phonology is learned like other human abilities. Moreover, the paper fleshes out the original claim of Philip Lieberman that Universal Grammar predicts that not everyone should be able to learn every language, i.e., the opposite of what UG is normally thought to predict. The paper also underscores the problem that the absence of recursion in Pirahã represents for Universal Grammar proposals.

A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirahã

The Pirahã language has been at the center of recent debates in linguistics, in large part because it is claimed not to exhibit recursion, a purported universal of human language. Here, we present an analysis of a novel corpus of natural Pirahã speech that was originally collected by Dan Everett and Steve Sheldon. We make the corpus freely available for further research. In the corpus, Pirahã sentences have been shallowly parsed and given morpheme-aligned English translations. We use the corpus to investigate the formal complexity of Pirahã syntax by searching for evidence of syntactic embedding. In particular, we search for sentences which could be analyzed as containing center-embedding, sentential complements, adverbials, complementizers, embedded possessors, conjunction or disjunction. We do not find unambiguous evidence for recursive embedding of sentences or noun phrases in the corpus. We find that the corpus is plausibly consistent with an analysis of Pirahã as a regular language, although this is not the only plausible analysis.