Everett v Noam Chomsky - The Chronicle Review

Home Opinion & Ideas The Chronicle Review

The Chronicle Review

March 20, 2012

Angry WordsWill one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation ofmodern linguistics?

By Tom Bartlett

A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian

tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns

their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria,

giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist,

instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an

evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined

to understand the people he's come to respect and love.

Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language

these people speak doesn't follow one of the fundamental tenets of

linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head,

undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to

communicate, and dethrone the discipline's long-reigning king, who

also happens to be among the most well-known and influential

intellectuals of the 20th century.

It feels like a movie, and it may in fact turn into one—there's a script

and producers on board. It's already a documentary that will air in

May on the Smithsonian Channel. A play is in the works in London.

And the man who lived the story, Daniel Everett, has written two

books about it. His 2008 memoir Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, is

filled with Joseph Conrad-esque drama. The new book, Language:

The Cultural Tool, which is lighter on jungle anecdotes, instead

takes square aim at Noam Chomsky, who has remained the

pre-eminent figure in linguistics since the 1960s, thanks to the

brilliance of his ideas and the force of his personality.

But before any Hollywood premiere, it's worth asking whether

Everett actually has it right. Answering that question is not

straightforward, in part because it hinges on a bit of grammar that

no one except linguists ever thinks about. It's also made tricky by

the fact that Everett is the foremost expert on this language, called

Pirahã, and one of only a handful of outsiders who can speak it,

making it tough for others to weigh in and leading his critics to

wonder aloud if he has somehow rigged the results.

More than any of that, though, his claim is difficult to verify because

linguistics is populated by a deeply factionalized group of scholars

who can't agree on what they're arguing about and who tend to

dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both. Such divisions

Researcher's Findings in the Amazon Pit Him Against Noam Chomsky... http://chronicle.com/article/Researchers-Findings-in-the/131260/

1 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

exist, to varying degrees, in all disciplines, but linguists seem

uncommonly hostile. The word "brutal" comes up again and again,

as do "spiteful," "ridiculous," and "childish."

With that in mind, why should anyone care about the answer?

Because it might hold the key to understanding what separates us

from the rest of the animals.

•

Imagine a linguist from Mars lands on Earth to survey the planet's

languages (presumably after obtaining the necessary interplanetary

funding). The alien would reasonably conclude that the languages of

the world are mostly similar with interesting but relatively minor

variations.

As science-fiction premises go it's rather dull, but it roughly

illustrates Chomsky's view of linguistics, known as Universal

Grammar, which has dominated the field for a half-century.

Chomsky is fond of this hypothetical and has used it repeatedly for

decades, including in a 1971 discussion with Michel Foucault, during

which he added that "this Martian would, if he were rational,

conclude that the structure of the knowledge that is acquired in the

case of language is basically internal to the human mind."

In his new book, Everett, now dean of arts and sciences at Bentley

University, writes about hearing Chomsky bring up the Martian in a

lecture he gave in the early 1990s. Everett noticed a group of

graduate students in the back row laughing and exchanging money.

After the talk, Everett asked them what was so funny, and they told

him they had taken bets on precisely when Chomsky would once

again cite the opinion of the linguist from Mars.

The somewhat unkind implication is that the distinguished scholar

had become so predictable that his audiences had to search for ways

to amuse themselves. Another Chomsky nugget is the way he

responds when asked to give a definition of Universal Grammar. He

will sometimes say that Universal Grammar is whatever made it

possible for his granddaughter to learn to talk but left the world's

supply of kittens and rocks speechless—a less-than-precise answer.

Say "kittens and rocks" to a cluster of linguists and eyes are likely to

roll.

Chomsky's detractors have said that Universal Grammar is

whatever he needs it to be at that moment. By keeping it mysterious,

they contend, he is able to dodge criticism and avoid those who are

gunning for him. It's hard to murder a phantom.

Everett's book is an attempt to deliver, if not a fatal blow, then at

least a solid right cross to Universal Grammar. He believes that the

structure of language doesn't spring from the mind but is instead

largely formed by culture, and he points to the Amazonian tribe he

studied for 30 years as evidence. It's not that Everett thinks our


2 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

brains don't play a role—they obviously do. But he argues that just

because we are capable of language does not mean it is necessarily

prewired. As he writes in his book: "The discovery that humans are

better at building human houses than porpoises tells us nothing

about whether the architecture of human houses is innate."

The language Everett has focused on, Pirahã, is spoken by just a few

hundred members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in a remote part of

Brazil. Everett got to know the Pirahã in the late 1970s as an

American missionary. With his wife and kids, he lived among them

for months at a time, learning their language from scratch. He

would point to objects and ask their names. He would transcribe

words that sounded identical to his ears but had completely

different meanings. His progress was maddeningly slow, and he had

to deal with the many challenges of jungle living. His story of taking

his family, by boat, to get treatment for severe malaria is an epic in

itself.

His initial goal was to translate the Bible. He got his Ph.D. in

linguistics along the way and, in 1984, spent a year studying at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an office near Chomsky's.

He was a true-blue Chomskyan then, so much so that his kids grew

up thinking Chomsky was more saint than professor. "All they ever

heard about was how great Chomsky was," he says. He was a

linguist with a dual focus: studying the Pirahã language and trying

to save the Pirahã from hell. The second part, he found, was tough

because the Pirahã are rooted in the present. They don't discuss the

future or the distant past. They don't have a belief in gods or an

afterlife. And they have a strong cultural resistance to the influence

of outsiders, dubbing all non-Pirahã "crooked heads." They

responded to Everett's evangelism with indifference or ridicule.

As he puts it now, the Pirahã weren't lost, and therefore they had no

interest in being saved. They are a happy people. Living in the

present has been an excellent strategy, and their lack of faith in the

divine has not hindered them. Everett came to convert them, but

over many years found that his own belief in God had melted away.

So did his belief in Chomsky, albeit for different reasons. The Pirahã

language is remarkable in many respects. Entire conversations can

be whistled, making it easier to communicate in the jungle while

hunting. Also, the Pirahã don't use numbers. They have words for

amounts, like a lot or a little, but nothing for five or one hundred.

Most significantly, for Everett's argument, he says their language

lacks what linguists call "recursion"—that is, the Pirahã don't embed

phrases in other phrases. They instead speak only in short, simple

sentences.

In a recursive language, additional phrases and clauses can be

inserted in a sentence, complicating the meaning, in theory

indefinitely. For most of us, the lack of recursion in a little-known

Brazilian language may not seem terribly interesting. But when


3 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Everett published a paper with that finding in 2005, the news

created a stir. There were magazine articles and TV appearances.

Fellow linguists weighed in, if only in some cases to scoff. Everett

had put himself and the Pirahã on the map.

His paper might have received a shrug if Chomsky had not recently

co-written a paper, published in 2002, that said (or seemed to say)

that recursion was the single most important feature of human

language. "In particular, animal communication systems lack the

rich expressive and open-ended power of human language (based

on humans' capacity for recursion)," the authors wrote. Elsewhere

in the paper, the authors wrote that the faculty of human language

"at minimum" contains recursion. They also deemed it the "only

uniquely human component of the faculty of language."

In other words, Chomsky had finally issued what seemed like a

concrete, definitive statement about what made human language

unique, exposing a possible vulnerability. Before Everett's paper

was published, there had already been back and forth between

Chomsky and the authors of a response to the 2002 paper, Ray

Jackendoff and Steven Pinker. In the wake of that public

disagreement, Everett's paper had extra punch.

It's been said that if you want to make a name for yourself in

modern linguistics, you have to either align yourself with Chomsky

or seek to destroy him. Either you are desirous of his approval or his

downfall. With his 2005 paper, Everett opted for the latter course.

•

Because the pace of academic debate is just this side of glacial, it

wasn't until June 2009 that the next major chapter in the saga was

written. Three scholars who are generally allies of Chomsky

published a lengthy paper in the journal Language dissecting

Everett's claims one by one. What he considered unique features of

Pirahã weren't unique. What he considered "gaps" in the language

weren't gaps. They argued this in part by comparing Everett's recent

paper to work he published in the 1980s, calling it, slightly snidely,

his earlier "rich material." Everett wasn't arguing with Chomsky,

they claimed; he was arguing with himself. Young Everett thought

Pirahã had recursion. Old Everett did not.

Everett's defense was, in so many words, to agree. Yes, his earlier

work was contradictory, but that's because he was still under

Chomsky's sway when he wrote it. It's natural, he argued, even

when doing basic field work, cataloging the words of a language and

the stories of a people, to be biased by your theoretical assumptions.

Everett was a Chomskyan through and through, so much so that he

had written the MSN Encarta encyclopedia entry on him. But now,

after more years with the Pirahã, the scales had fallen from his eyes,

and he saw the language on its own terms rather than those he was

trying to impose on it.


4 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

David Pesetsky, a linguistics professor at MIT and one of the

authors of the critical Language paper, thinks Everett was trying to

gin up a "Star Wars-level battle between himself and the forces of

Universal Grammar," presumably with Everett as Luke Skywalker

and Chomsky as Darth Vader.

Contradicting Everett meant getting into the weeds of the Pirahã

language, a language that Everett knew intimately and his critics did

not. "Most people took the attitude that this wasn't worth taking

on," Pesetsky says. "There's a junior-high-school corridor, two kids

are having a fight, and everyone else stands back." Everett wrote a

lengthy reply that Pesetsky and his co-authors found unsatisfying

and evasive. "The response could have been 'Yeah, we need to do

this more carefully,'" says Pesetsky. "But he's had seven years to do

it more carefully and he hasn't."

Critics haven't just accused Everett of inaccurate analysis. He's the

sole authority on a language that he says changes everything. If he

wanted to, they suggest, he could lie about his findings without

getting caught. Some were willing to declare him essentially a fraud.

That's what one of the authors of the 2009 paper, Andrew Nevins,

now at University College London, seems to believe. When I

requested an interview with Nevins, his reply read, "I may be being

glib, but it seems you've already analyzed this kind of case!" Below

his message was a link to an article I had written about a Dutch social

psychologist who had admitted to fabricating results, including

creating data from studies that were never conducted. In another

e-mail, after declining to expand on his apparent accusation, Nevins

wrote that the "world does not need another article about Dan

Everett."

In 2007, Everett heard reports of a letter signed by Cilene

Rodrigues, who is Brazilian, and who co-wrote the paper with

Pesetsky and Nevins, that accuses him of racism. According to

Everett, he got a call from a source informing him that Rodrigues,

an honorary research fellow at University College London, had sent

a letter to the organization in Brazil that grants permission for

researchers to visit indigenous groups like the Pirahã. He then

discovered that the organization, called FUNAI, the National Indian

Foundation, would no longer grant him permission to visit the

Pirahã, whom he had known for most of his adult life and who

remain the focus of his research.

He still hasn't been able to return. Rodrigues would not respond

directly to questions about whether she had signed such a letter, nor

would Nevins. Rodrigues forwarded an e-mail from another linguist

who has worked in Brazil, which speculates that Everett was denied

access to the Pirahã because he did not obtain the proper permits

and flouted the law, accusations Everett calls "completely false" and

"amazingly nasty lies."

•


5 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Whatever the reason for his being blocked, the question remains: Is

Everett's work racist? The accusation goes that because Everett says

that the Pirahã do not have recursion, and that all human languages

supposedly have recursion, Everett is asserting that the Pirahã are

less than human. Part of this claim is based on an online summary,

written by a former graduate student of Everett's, that quotes

traders in Brazil saying the Pirahã "talk like chickens and act like

monkeys," something Everett himself never said and condemns.

The issue is sensitive because the Pirahã, who eschew the trappings

of modern civilization and live the way their forebears lived for

thousands of years, are regularly denigrated by their neighbors in

the region as less than human. The fact that Everett is American,

not Brazilian, lends the charge added symbolic weight.

When you read Everett's two books about the Pirahã, it is nearly

impossible to think that he believes they are inferior. In fact, he goes

to great lengths not to condescend and offers defenses of practices

that outsiders would probably find repugnant. In one instance he

describes, a Pirahã woman died, leaving behind a baby that the rest

of the tribe thought was too sick to live. Everett cared for the infant.

One day, while he was away, members of the tribe killed the baby,

telling him that it was in pain and wanted to die. He cried, but didn't

condemn, instead defending in the book their seemingly cruel logic.

Likewise, the Pirahã's aversion to learning agriculture, or preserving

meat, or the fact that they show no interest in producing artwork, is

portrayed by Everett not as a shortcoming but as evidence of the

Pirahã's insistence on living in the present. Their nonhierarchical

social system seems to Everett fair and sensible. He is critical of his

own earlier attempts to convert the Pirahã to Christianity as a sort

of "colonialism of the mind." If anything, Everett is more open to a

charge of romanticizing the Pirahã culture.

Other critics are more measured but equally suspicious. Mark

Baker, a linguist at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, who

considers himself part of Chomsky's camp, mentions Everett's

"vested motive" in saying that the Pirahã don't have recursion. "We

always have to be a little careful when we have one person who has

researched a language that isn't accessible to other people," Baker

says. He is dubious of Everett's claims. "I can't believe it's true as

described," he says.

Chomsky hasn't exactly risen above the fray. He told a Brazilian

newspaper that Everett was a "charlatan." In the documentary

about Everett, Chomsky raises the possibility, without saying he

believes it, that Everett may have faked his results. Behind the

scenes, he has been active as well. According to Pesetsky, Chomsky

asked him to send an e-mail to David Papineau, a professor of

philosophy at King's College London, who had written a positive, or

at least not negative, review of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. The

e-mail complained that Papineau had misunderstood recursion and


6 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

was incorrectly siding with Everett. Papineau thought he had done

nothing of the sort. "For people outside of linguistics, it's rather

surprising to find this kind of protection of orthodoxy," Papineau

says.

And what if the Pirahã don't have recursion? Rather than ferreting

out flaws in Everett's work as Pesetsky did, Chomsky's preferred

response is to say that it doesn't matter. In a lecture he gave last

October at University College London, he referred to Everett's work

without mentioning his name, talking about those who believed that

"exceptions to the generalizations are considered lethal." He went

on to say that a "rational reaction" to finding such exceptions "isn't

to say 'Let's throw out the field.'" Universal Grammar permits such

exceptions. There is no problem. As Pesetsky puts it: "There's

nothing that says languages without subordinate clauses can't exist."

Except the 2002 paper on which Chomsky's name appears. Pesetsky

and others have backed away from that paper, arguing not that it

was incorrect, but that it was "written in an unfortunate way" and

that the authors were "trying to make certain things comprehensible

about linguistics to a larger public, but they didn't make it clear that

they were simplifying." Some say that Chomsky signed his name to

the paper but that it was actually written by Marc Hauser, the

former professor of psychology at Harvard University, who resigned

after Harvard officials found him guilty of eight counts of research

misconduct. (For the record, no one has suggested the alleged

misconduct affected his work with Chomsky.)

Chomsky declined to grant me an interview. Those close to him say

he sees Everett as seizing on a few stray, perhaps underexplained,

lines from that 2002 paper and distorting them for his own

purposes. And the truth, Chomsky has made clear, should be

apparent to any rational person.

•

Ted Gibson has heard that one before. When Gibson, a professor of

cognitive sciences at MIT, gave a paper on the topic at a January

meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Portland, Ore.,

Pesetsky stood up at the end to ask a question. "His first comment

was that Chomsky never said that. I went back and found the slide,"

he says. "Whenever I talk about this question in front of these

people I have to put up the literal quote from Chomsky. Then I have

to put it up again."

Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of linguistics at the University of

Edinburgh, is also vexed at how Chomsky and company have, in his

view, played rhetorical sleight-of-hand to make their case. "They

have retreated to such an extreme degree that it says really

nothing," he says. "If it has a sentence longer than three words then

they're claiming they were right. If that's what they claim, then they

weren't claiming anything." Pullum calls this move "grossly


7 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

dishonest and deeply silly."

Everett has been arguing about this for seven years. He says Pirahã

undermines Universal Grammar. The other side says it doesn't. In

an effort to settle the dispute, Everett asked Gibson, who holds a

joint appointment in linguistics at MIT, to look at the data and

reach his own conclusions. He didn't provide Gibson with data he

had collected himself because he knows his critics suspect those

data have been cooked. Instead he provided him with sentences and

stories collected by his missionary predecessor. That way, no one

could object that it was biased.

In the documentary about Everett, handing over the data to Gibson

is given tremendous narrative importance. Everett is the bearded,

safari-hatted field researcher boating down a river in the middle of

nowhere, talking and eating with the natives. Meanwhile, Gibson is

the nerd hunched over his keyboard back in Cambridge, crunching

the data, examining it with his research assistants, to determine

whether Everett really has discovered something. If you watch the

documentary, you get the sense that what Gibson has found

confirms Everett's theory. And that's the story you get from Everett,

too. In our first interview, he encouraged me to call Gibson. "The

evidence supports what I'm saying," he told me, noting that he and

Gibson had a few minor differences of interpretation.

But that's not what Gibson thinks. Some of what he found does

support Everett. For example, he's confirmed that Pirahã lacks

possessive recursion, phrases like "my brother's mother's house."

Also, there appear to be no conjunctions like "and" or "or." In other

instances, though, he's found evidence that seems to undercut

Everett's claims—specifically, when it comes to noun phrases in

sentences like "His mother, Itaha, spoke."

That is a simple sentence, but inserting the mother's name is a

hallmark of recursion. Gibson's paper, on which Everett is a

co-author, states, "We have provided suggestive evidence that

Pirahã may have sentences with recursive structures."

If that turns out to be true, it would undermine the primary thesis of

both of Everett's books about the Pirahã. Rather than the hero who

spent years in the Amazon emerging with evidence that demolished

the field's predominant theory, Everett would be the descriptive

linguist who came back with a couple of books full of riveting

anecdotes and cataloged a language that is remarkable, but hardly

changes the game.

Everett only realized during the reporting of this article that Gibson

disagreed with him so strongly. Until then, he had been saying that

the results generally supported his theory. "I don't know why he

says that," Gibson says. "Because it doesn't. He wrote that our work

corroborates it. A better word would be falsified. Suggestive

evidence is against it right now and not for it." Though, he points


8 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

out, the verdict isn't final. "It looks like it is recursive," he says. "I

wouldn't bet my life on it."

Another researcher, Ray Jackendoff, a linguist at Tufts University,

was also provided the data and sees it slightly differently. "I think

we decided there is some embedding but it is of limited depth," he

says. "It's not recursive in the sense that you can have infinitely deep

embedding." Remember that in Chomsky's paper, it was the idea

that "open-ended" recursion was possible that separated human and

animal communication. Whether the kind of limited recursion

Gibson and Jackendoff have noted qualifies depends, like

everything else in this debate, on the interpretation.

Everett thinks what Gibson has found is not recursion, but rather

false starts, and he believes further research will back him up.

"These are very short, extremely limited examples and they almost

always are nouns clarifying other nouns," he says. "You almost

never see anything but that in these cases." And he points out that

there still doesn't seem to be any evidence of infinite recursion. Says

Everett: "There simply is no way, even if what I claim to be false

starts are recursive instead, to say, "'My mother, Susie, you know

who I mean, you like her, is coming tonight.'"

•

The field has a history of theoretical disagreements that turn ugly.

In the book The Linguistic Wars, published in 1995, Randy Allen

Harris tells the story of another skirmish between Chomsky and a

group of insurgent linguists called generative semanticists.

Chomsky dismissed his opponents' arguments as absurd. His

opponents accused him of altering his theories when confronted and

of general arrogance. "Chomsky has the impressive rhetorical talent

of offering ideas which are at once tentative and fully endorsed, of

appearing to take the if out of his arguments while nevertheless

keeping it safely around," writes Harris.

That rhetorical talent was on display in his lecture last October, in

which he didn't just disagree with other linguists, but treated their

arguments as ridiculous and a mortal danger to the field. The style

seems to be reflected in his political activism. Watch his 1969 debate

on Firing Line against William F. Buckley Jr., available on YouTube,

and witness Chomsky tie his famous interlocutor in knots. It is a

thorough, measured evisceration. Chomsky is willing to deploy

those formidable skills in linguistic arguments as well.

Everett is far from the only current Chomsky challenger. Recently

there's been a rise in so-called corpus linguistics, a data-driven

method of evaluating a language, using computer software to

analyze sentences and phrases. The method produces detailed

information and, for scholars like Gibson, finally provides scientific

rigor for a field he believes has been mired in never-ending

theoretical disputes. That, along with the brain-scanning technology


9 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

with your Chronicle account: Don't have an account? Create one now.Or log in using one of these alternatives:

Log in to post

Everett's descriptions of the Pirahã are extremely similar to a short story I read many years ago. didhe read it too?

10 people liked this.

that linguists are increasingly making use of, may be able to help

resolve questions about how much of the structure of language is

innate and how much is shaped by culture.

But Chomsky has little use for that method. In his lecture, he

deemed corpus linguistics nonscientific, comparing it to doing

physics by describing the swirl of leaves on a windy day rather than

performing experiments. This was "just statistical modeling," he

said, evidence of a "kind of pathology in the cognitive sciences."

Referring to brain scans, Chomsky joked that the only way to get a

grant was to propose an fMRI.

As for Universal Grammar, some are already writing its obituary.

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for

Evolutionary Anthropology, has stated flatly that "Universal

Grammar is dead." Two linguists, Nicholas Evans and Stephen

Levinson, published a paper in 2009 titled "The Myth of Language

Universals," arguing that the "claims of Universal Grammar ... are

either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they

refer to tendencies rather than strict universals." Pullum has a

similar take: "There is no Universal Grammar now, not if you take

Chomsky seriously about the things he says."

Gibson puts it even more harshly. Just as Chomsky doesn't think

corpus linguistics is science, Gibson doesn't think Universal

Grammar is worthwhile. "The question is, 'What is it?' How much is

built-in and what does it do? There are no details," he says. "It's

crazy to say it's dead. It was never alive."

Such proclamations have been made before and Chomsky, now 83,

has a history of outmaneuvering and outlasting his adversaries.

Whether Everett will be yet another in a long line of would-be

debunkers who turn into footnotes remains to be seen. "I probably

do, despite my best intentions, hope that I turn out to be right," he

says. "I know that it is not scientific. But I would be a hypocrite if I

didn't admit it."

CommentsPowered by DISQUS

Add a comment

Showing 40 of 276 comments

Sort by Follow comments: by e-mail by RSS

Real-time updating is paused. (Resume)

srfernandez 3 months ago


10 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Yes, he did.


What short story was it?


It is not compulsory that we must agree on every points. All have their ownopinnions.Bank Jobs

This is an article that covers a disagreement within linguistics by treating one side with respect andtrashing the other. I hope that is obvious enough to readers that they will pause before taking Mr.Bartlett's report at face value.

I play a role in the article as a co-author of a detailed paper about Everett's claims that appeared inLanguage, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Mr. Bartlett's article misrepresents thepoint of the article.

Bartlett's article states correctly that we "dissected Everett's claims one by one", and that ourconclusions were negative. The article is also correct that we made extensive use of Everett's ownearlier work. But what was crucial in that work was not Everett's earlier *opinions* about thelanguage, but his *data*.

What we discovered was case after case in which Everett's claims about Pirahã werecounterexemplified by the data he had published in his own published grammar of the language --and that these contradictions were not even mentioned in the later paper in which his new claimswere advanced. That's not how linguistics (or any field) is supposed to work. Yes, of course it's fineto have new results that force a rethinking of older results. That's how progress is made. But thatwasn't the case here. No new data was presented that forced any rethinking whatsoever, and themass of contradictory older data was simply ignored. That was the main message of our paperabout the facts of Pirahã. The field has standards of argumentation and evidence, and we arguedthat Everett had not met them.

This last point is important, because what we were defending (in our view) was something basic. For all our human failings, linguistics is NOT a field full of "scholars who can't agree on whatthey're arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both". Thelinguistics I know is a field full of people who have questions and puzzles about the languages of theworld that they would like to solve. They propose solutions, and argue about their proposals on thebasis of logic and evidence. That is emphatically not what happened in the case of Pirahã, and thatwas the real take-home message of our paper.

There is a lot more to say, but these are the points most relevant to the actual issues. Our paper canbe found on the LingBuzz linguistics archive site, and I invite readers of this column to have a lookat it themselves.


I appreciate your detailed comment, but I'm wondering whether identifying yourself as one ofthe persons mentioned is a rhetorical strategy to lend credibility to your claims. We've no wayto certainly know you are, indeed, the co-author of the article; if you are, you should submit anofficial reply to CHE for a future column.


Socratease2 3 months ago

Jeannine Tresch 2 months ago

Remo Rawat 4 weeks ago

davidpesetsky 3 months ago

periwinkleblue 3 months ago

Asya Pereltsvaig 3 months ago


11 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Unlike most people in this forum, Prof. Pesetsky actually posted comments under his realname. Why don't you check out his MIT webpage or read the article he co-authored inLanguage?


This is the internet. Anyone could make an account, put someone else's name on it,and pretend to be that person.

I'm not saying that's at all likely here, but you can't trust anything you read on theinternet without some sort of external validation.


What? Your paranoia in this case is ill-founded and nonsensical. The author of thatcomment is engaging in some conspiracy to discredit Daniel Everett? By arguingreasonably and coherently for his point of view, and offering evidence to make his case? Idon't follow the reasoning behind your objection, and I'm wondering whether you're notoperating at the behest of Everett himself.


Huh?


Wow, that is some real blog paranoia, are the stakes in a CHE blog that high you need toquestion identity? How do we know that you aren't Everett? Please send my your socialsecurity number so I can check. Plenty of chronicle authors and people mentioned instudies respond to comments section, you will need to work full time to question all their"credibilities."


periwinkle seems more witty than paranoid...


The basic idea, “Pirahã slays Chomsky”, is just bad reasoning. Chomsky is concerned with ourmental hardware. He’s never said that every language uses all the hardware. It’s like someonewith an iphone who doesn’t exploit all its functions: their iphone still has the same hardwareas everyone else’s.

Here's a fuller working out of this (non)problem, on my blog. I hope some journalists read it... http://daniel-harbour.blogspot...


This is a great analogy, Daniel!

Ross Patton 3 months ago

MC HFCS 3 months ago

deweywilmot 3 months ago


deweywilmot 3 months ago

h_a_r_b_o_u_r 3 months ago



12 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM


Ah, so then it isn't testable. Very clever...


"For all our human failings, linguistics is NOT a field full of "scholarswho can't agree on what they're arguing about and who tend to dismisstheir opponents as morons or frauds or both"."

Isn't that exactly what you're doing to Everett in your comment? Dismissing him as a moronor fraud or both?

Dunno why people said this is "detailed." You reference your own paper and nothing else Icould use to determine whether what you say is creditable. Pffft.


That's what you get in general linguistics. The diversion and controversy are there because language is two thirds in the depth of the mind,whence it cannot be fished out of for examination. The set of sound and letters that is here forrecording and studies is nothing without reference to the meaning. The history of modernlinguistics is the history of people trying to overcome this difficulty by looking for the structure (thatEco so rightly called "missing") in the arrangement of sounds and letters that wouldallow exorcising the meaning. Hjelmslev tried this by enlarging the characteristics of the phonemicstructure to fit all langauge system, Chomsky chose grammar, neither attempt was a success, butneither was fruitless at the same time.

The point here is that there are numerous camps in linguistics, and none of them holds the picklockto the language. The choice of the camp is largely the choice between the tools that are better suitedto a particular task. And it would seem that Everett made the wrong choice at some time. Let meillustrate

"He believes that the structure of language doesn't spring from the mind but is instead largelyformed by culture, and he points to the Amazonian tribe he studied for 30 years as evidence. It's notthat Everett thinks our brains don't play a role—they obviously do. But he argues that just becausewe are capable of language does not mean it is necessarily prewired."

This is hardly a discovery. There were, if I'm not mistaken, studies of children who were brought upwithout any contact to human languages, in India namely, that give first-hand evidence to the laststatement of the quoted abstract. As for the first quoted sentence, it's hard for me to believe that anAmerican with a PhD in Linguistics and an interest in primitive languages can ignor or be ignorantof the works of such American descriptivists as Sapir, Whorf, etc., who studied the matterextensively and come up with the same arguments before the WW2.

I'm neither from reference police, nor from Chomsky's camp. But I have to ask this: are thereferences to what was spoken about in the previous paragraph missing only from the article, orfrom Everett's work altogether?

If the latter - One begins to think, Everett, as presented by the article, seems to be a pretty naiveresearcher. Besides, his is the story of a person who lost faith in another person's writings, as well asin God. It's hard to turn one's frustration against something that doesn't exist, With "anotherperson", however, especially if the "another person" is a bit of a celebrity, it's different...

If the former, and in any case, the article here begins with "will one researcher's discovery deep inthe Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?" I'm seeing the structure of the oldDavid vs. Goliath myth here. Chomsky, however, is not "the" foundation of modern linguistics, he is"one of" the numerous founding fathers, some of whom made some of the "discoveries" made by"one researcher" almost a century before. In view of that, the article can be seen as sensationalwithout a cause.

Everett might have made a real discovery, the missing link in the evolution from the anymalcommunication to human language. Many of researchers of primitive languages thought they did it,but a closer look always proved them wrong so far. But the use of the findings only for rhetoricalpurposes - to attack one statement by one author - at least, that's how it is presented in the article -puts a big mine under this.

If the author's intention, however, was to present the field of linguistics as a sort of theology, withworks of some authors perceived as Holy Script, and most argument revolving over whose HolyScript is holier - then, well, what can I say? That's a true vision.

Friendalicious 2 months ago

wysinwyg 3 months ago

humpty_dumpty 3 months ago


13 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM


"a PhD in Linguistics and an interest in primitive languages can ignor or be ignorant of theworks of such American descriptivists as Sapir, Whorf, etc., who studied the matter extensivelyand come up with the same arguments before the WW2."

My thoughts exactly! Especially Whorf's 1939 article, "The Relation of Habitual Thought andBehavior to Language." Too many in linguistics and anthropology in general have lost sight ofearlier writings or choose to ignore them and say the same things. Venture to read A.M.Hocart's 1915 article "Psychology and Ethnology" and you will think you're in the 1980's topresent.


Good grief! There is no such thing as a "primitive language".

So this puts me in what camp? I couldn't say but I'm pretty sure it's part of foundationallinguistics.


The fights are so vicious, because there is so little at stake.


Yeah, what could be important about the fundamental nature of human language?


This is rather about the *understanding* of the fundamental nature of human language,not the fundamental nature of human language itself (which, I suspect, will remainunscathed either way).


This, it seems to me, is the real issue here. What is at stake is not the nature of anunderlying reality but where various people sit in a complex social institution (anacademic discipline) and the honors/rewards and that go along with their status.


To seanallen: Au contraire, everything is at stake. Is the notion, so well described by Orwell, that alimitation placed upon language results in a limitation on thought? Is that particular Brazilian tribetrapped in the present, with no ability to speak of the future or past?In the particular case, the question even arises as to the value of Christianity and westerncivilization. The tribe cannot speak recursively, they are stuck in the present, and they are happy.Are they happy because of these things? Perhaps they are the ultimate 'zen buddhists' - who havegiven up everything to reach enlightenment. Yet what a price they have paid.Are those who pay such a price human? Pre-human, post-human, super-human?

richarddeu 3 months ago

katisumas 2 months ago

seanallen 3 months ago

maw57 3 months ago

hackerhaus 3 months ago

drewweiss 2 months ago

lawman11 3 months ago


14 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM


To a layperson like myself, they are humans who are happy but doomed because of lacking anability that sadder but more successful cultures have.


Define a successful culture; one like ours in the US where we impose upon othercountries to grab their land, oil and resources? A culture like ours that is addicted toprescription medicines because we are so unhealthy and unhappy? And by the way, it is avery colonizing thing to define a group of people as "happy" in the context that this groupof people are being discussed.


Ours would be a successful one, yes. To be able to maintain an identity in the face ofcolonization would be successful as well. To wither away and be wiped from the faceof the earth is unsuccessful.


Well, we may or may not see who will, in the long run, wither away. If we do witheraway, then we won't.

Please note that all persons who observe always live in the present. And to thosealive, it always seems obvious that things got there because they deserved to getthere.


Though other cultures may not require prescriptions for them, "make-you-feel-good" drugs of various types are used practically universally.


As an anthropologist it is important to note that the claim that "make-you-feel-gooddrugs of various types are used pratically universally" is a false claim. This is notshown in the empirical field research of anthropology. And certainly where "drugs"are used, they are often used in a narrowly defined ritual context.


Thank god you identify yourself as a "layperson." If they are doomed, it is not becausethey are "happy" or "not successful," it is because the "sadder cultures" will end updestroying them. Who is at the top of the "sad cultures" anyway? Must be Klownistsan,nothing is sadder than the tears of a Klown. Especially when no one is around.


okieinexile 3 months ago

Uhuru SanDiego 3 months ago

okieinexile 3 months ago

EllenHunt 3 months ago


tyroneslothrop 3 months ago


mbelvadi 3 months ago


15 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Aside from the linguistics wars, this author obviously has his own philosophical ax to grind."Because it might hold the key to understanding what separates us from the rest of the animals." This sentence assumes that humans necessarily must be separated from the rest of the animals andthe quest is to find the reason to do so. It assumes what still must be proven. I look forward to theday when a researcher discovers recursion in dolphin language - don't assume that day is notcoming!


And then we will look in to what separates dolphins from the rest of the animals. See how thatworks?


This article is not showing the linguistics in a proper way. it presents it as a field full ofcontroversies But it is not true. Every academic discipline has its share of controversies, adversaries,contradictions but it does not mean these are fruitless. They crop up and will crop up wheneverhumans interact. Let’s not make these controversies blow out of proportion for the sake ofsensational writing. As with the Universal grammar, it is just a theory though best one among otheruseful theories in linguistics. it is not going to be dead as some researchers expect but it willnevertheless be modified and made more rigorous and explanatory. This debate among someresearchers had already been presented in detail on website Edge. Here is a link: http://edge.org/conversation/r...


Terrific piece. Absorbing subject, and brilliantly written. Thank you. Really admired the way youpresented a potentially dry subject. I read it right to the end.


"a potentially dry subject"

I never understand the use of this phrase. How can anything that the mind considers be "dry"or uninteresting?


You've never been bored? Read an academic paper? Or worse, a 'scientific' article? ;-)


You must not be a scientist...right?


I wonder whether anyone in this debate has considered other possible explanations for this nexus.For example, perhaps because of inbreeding the piraha have developed a genetic mutation whichlimits their use of recursions in language. This would not make them subhuman unless people with

ElRonbo 3 months ago

manzerjun308 3 months ago

Narwhale 3 months ago

BestBoy 3 months ago

marka 3 months ago

11290894 3 months ago

wilds 3 months ago


16 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

6 toes and fingers are also subhuman. I found it more perplexing that they don't have a past orfuture in their thinking. Perhaps this too is genetically based. Rather than trying to pound eachother into submission, take a six pack out on the patio and think outside of the box.


Or perhaps it has nothing whatsoever to do with genetics, because the structure of language isjust not tightly tied to the structure of the brain.


The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

bobx 3 months ago


17 of 17 7/07/2012 11:10 PM

Date post:	26-Oct-2014
Category:	Documents
Upload:	faze-too
View:	17 times
Download:	2 times

Everett v Noam Chomsky - The Chronicle Review

Documents