Out on a limb over language

Read more here: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19726391.900-interview-out-on-a...

Linguist Daniel Everett thinks that the language of the Pirahã - an indigenous tribe from Brazil - contradicts the theory that all languages share a single, innate grammar

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Piraha
• Pirahã
• Dan
• Everett
• linguist
• language
• linguistics
• Brazil
• tribe
• grammar
• innate
• new
• scientist
• newscientist

[thedonnellan]

Suck on that Mr Chomsky!!!

[DanFrederiksen]

leave the piraha alone! : )

interesting people. I would hope they always keep in mind what their presence does to their culture. it would be a shame if they lost their culture only to become drunks in our society.

we could learn something from the ideals of star trek the next generation in that regard. a non interference directive. come to them as one of them

[minzhide]

@pontaven12 The argument in 'Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment' was based heavily on the ideas that brought about Merge, namely that everything is embedded b/c constituency (or dependency, but that brings in whole new issues in itself) grammar is 'right'. So, from a theory internal standpoint 'embedding' is unfalsifiable, even if you found a language that only permits two morpheme sentences. So far I haven't seen anyone address these areas on either side, which really leaves it wide open.

[minzhide]

@pontaven12 If you're talking about 'Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment' it was written by three linguists, but one was from MIT, and it shouldn't be taken seriously. They were unable to coherently argue that any structures were embedded, failing to recognize that never do you see arguments within an 'embedded' structure that has unambiguously embedded scope, they mischaracterized -sai phrase ordering w/ respect to Bengali, and misrepresented the Mandarin pronominal inventory... pure garbage.

[DanFrederiksen]

@Slumpnasty that's very civilized of you. any particular reason?

[Slumpnasty]

@DanFrederiksen I really want to kick your ass.

[theskilled99]

Might be a good idea if people learnt a little bit more than we learn from this vid before they make any judgments on Everett's methods and the validity of his research with regards embedded clauses. You could read his papers on the subject first for a start.



[plathhs]

@Rufusdos It looks like someone needs to spend more than 25 years with these people in the jungle, and then come back and tell us whether he has changed his mind or not.

[deiutz]

@turbozed oh you...

[Rufusdos]

The first example "the cat fell down" was just elision. Anyone who thinks it's some sort of never-before-seen inability to use embedded clauses just can't keep up!

[pontaven12]

In the last example the sorts of sentences like John's wife's car can't be made in German, so nothing new there.

Also if these experiments are meant to falsify any of U.G hypotheses (there are many) they fail. Knowing what the man meant or whether he understood the test is a problem of induction issue and I am not entirely sure that Everett has proven anything here.

[pontaven12]

You say that, however Dan Everett's own earlier work seemed to show that Piraha didn't falsify the ideas in Government and Binding. There seems to be no apparent grounds for his sudden change in opinon. These criticisms are not my own, but of three MIT professors who looked at Everett's work and found many dodgy areas. He claimed that there were things unique to Piraha that were actually found in quite a few other languages as well.