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RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT

WHY THE PIRAHÃ DON'T HAVE NUMBERS
A Talk With Daniel L. Everett [6.11.07]

As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called "the essential property of language," the essential building block—in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems—then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language—Pirahã—means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions.

DANIEL L. EVERETT, a former evangelical Christian missionary to the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon for more than 20 years, is chair of languages, literatures, and cultures and professor of linguistics and anthropology at Illinois State University. Dan Everett's Edge Bio Page

The Reality Club: Steven Pinker, Dan Everett, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., David Pesetsky, Dan Everett


NEW YORKER
April 16, 2007

In this issue, John Colapinto reports on his visit to the Pirahã tribe in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil. Here is a portfolio of Martin Schoeller’s images of the trip, along with one of Schoeller at work, taken by his assistant, Markian Lozowchuk.

SLIDE SHOW
A TRIBE APART

A REPORTER AT LARGE
The Interpreter
John Colapinto

Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?

Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar.

[ED. NOTE: Thanks to the New Yorker for making available the link to John Colapinto's article.]


CHICAGO TRIBUNE
June 10, 2007

Shaking language to the core
By Ron Grossman

NORMAL, Ill. -- To get some idea of the brouhaha currently enveloping linguists, occupants of a usually quiet corner of the ivory tower, suppose a high-school physics teacher found a hole in the theory of relativity.

Students of language consider Noam Chomsky the Einstein of their discipline. Linguistics is a very old science, but beginning in the 1950s, Chomsky so revolutionized the field that linguists refer to the time prior to his work as B.C., or before Chomsky.

They may have to add another marker: A.D., after Dan.

Daniel Everett, a faculty member at Illinois State University, has done field work among a tiny tribe in the Amazon. He reports that their obscure language lacks a fundamental characteristic that, according to Chomsky's theory, underlies all human language.

With that declaration, Everett pitted himself against a giant in the field, and modest ISU against the nation's elite universities. In the process, he drew national attention to this arcane field and enveloped scholars around the world in a battle that plays out over and over in -- this is academia, after all -- conferences and seminars. ...

PROSPECT MAGAZINE
June 30, 2007 

Challenging Chomsky
Universal grammar is the most important theory in linguistics. Has the language of one tribe now disproved it?

By Philip Oltermann

In 2005, the American anthropologist Daniel Everett published an article in Current Anthropology in which he presented his insights into Pirahã life, acquired over years spent living with the tribe. Pirahã culture, Everett claimed, was unique: it was totally focused on immediate experience and it lacked basic number skills, a vocabulary for colours, a past perfect tense and a creation myth....

 

RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT [1]

RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT: WHY THE PIRAHÃ DON'T HAVE NUMBERS

The research question that has motivated my work for the last 25–30 years has been, what is the nature of language. This is the question that motivates most linguistics research. But I started off asking it one way and came to the conclusion that asking it that way was probably wrong and I now have a different way of approaching the problem. 

My original concern was to think about Language with a capital "L." Human Language, what it's like in the brain, what the brain has to be like to sustain the capacity for Language. The most influential ideas for me in my early research were the ideas of Noam Chomsky, principally the proposal that there is an innate capacity for grammar in our genes, and that the acquisition of any given language is simply learning what the different parameter-settings are. What is a parameter?

Here's an example, called the "pro-drop" parameter. In English we always have to have a subject, even when it doesn't mean anything, like in "it rains"—"it" doesn't really refer to anything. "It" just is necessary because English has to have subjects. But in a language like Spanish or Portuguese, I don't say "it rains," I say just "rains"—chuva—in Portuguese, because Portuguese has a positive setting for the pro-drop parameter identified in Chomskyan research. All languages have either a positive (as Portuguese) or negative (as English) setting for this parameter. And it has other effects as well in addition to allowing a language to drop subjects; it entails a number of other characteristics.

It's a very attractive idea that people are born with a genetic pre-specification to set parameters in different ways, the environment serving as a "trigger." As Pinker put it, we have an instinct to learn language, and the environment triggers and shapes that instinct. But the environment is nothing more than that in this view—a shaper and a trigger; it is not fundamental to the actual final product in the Pinker-Chomsky view in the way that I have to come to think it actually is. Parameters and language as an instinct are very attractive ideas. Yet at the same time there are a number of components of languages that I've looked at that just don't seem to follow from these ideas.

The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there's no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say "John's brother's house," I have a noun, "house," which occurs in a noun phrase, "brother's house," and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, "John's brother's house." This makes a lot of sense, and it's an interesting property of human language.

But what if a language didn't show recursion? What would be the significance of that? First of all, it would mean that the language is not infinite—it would be a finite language, there could only be limited number of sentences in that language. It would also mean that you could specify the upper size of a particular sentence in that language. That sounds bizarre, until we think of something like chess, which has also got a finite number of moves, but chess is an enormously productive game, it can be played and has been played for centuries, and many of these moves are novel, and the fact that it's finite really doesn't tell us much about its richness, or its importance.

If there were a finite language, because of the lack of recursion, that wouldn't mean that it wasn't spoken by normal humans, nor would it mean that it wasn't a very rich source of communication. But if you lived in an environment in which culture restricted the topics that you talked about, and not only just your general environmental limitations on the topics you talked about, but if there were a value in the culture that said, don't talk about topics that go beyond, say, immediate experience—in other words, don't talk about anything that you haven't seen or that hasn't been told to you by an eyewitness—this would severely limit what you could talk about. If that's the case, then that language might be finite, but it wouldn't be a poor language; it could be a very rich language. The fact that it's finite doesn't mean it's not a very rich language. And if that's the case, then you would look for evidence that this language lacked recursion.

So in the case of Pirahã, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house." You can say "John's house," you can say "John's brother," but if you want to say "John's brother's house," you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house." They have to say it in separate sentences.

As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called "the essential property of language," the essential building block—in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems—then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language—Pirahã—means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions. 

One answer that's been given when I claim that Pirahã lacks recursion, is that recursion is a tool that's made available by the brain, but it doesn't have to be used. But then that's very difficult to reconcile with the idea that it's an essential property of human language—if it doesn't have to appear in a given language then, in principle, it doesn't have to appear in any language. If it doesn't have to appear in one part of a language, it doesn't have to appear in any part of a language.

It's not clear what causes recursion; in fact, just two weeks ago, at Illinois State University, we held an international conference on recursion in human language, which was the first conference of its kind ever held, and we had researchers from all around the world come and talk about recursion. One interesting thing that emerged from this is that the linguists, mathematicians and computer scientists disagree on what recursion is, and how significant it is. Also, there are many examples of recursion lacking in a number of structures in languages where we otherwise would expect it. So recursion as the essential building block of human language, if Chomsky's correct, is difficult for me to apply as an intellectual trying to build a theory of human language, because it's not clear what it is, and it's not clear that it is in fact essential to different languages.

So as an alternative, what might we say?  Well, recursion could occur because human beings are just smarter than species without it. In fact, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Herbert Simon, who taught psychology for many years at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote an important article in 1962 called "The Architecture of Complexity," and in effect, although he doesn't use this word, he argued that recursive structures are fundamental to information processing. He argued that these are just part of the human brain, and we use them not just in language, but in economy, and discussion of problem-solving, and the stories that we tell. 

If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories. So my idea is that recursion is absolutely essential to the human brain, and it's a part of the fact that humans have larger brains than other species. In fact, one of the papers at the recursion conference was on recursion in other species, and it talked about how when deer look for food in the forest, they often use recursive strategies to map their way across the forest and back, and take little side paths that can be analyzed as recursive paths. So it's not clear, first of all that recursion is unique to humans, and it's certainly not clear that recursion is part of language as opposed to part of the brain's general processing.

I am engaging in ongoing research on Pirahã, along with other researchers, including some from MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, led by Professor Ted Gibson, and other researchers from the University of Manchester. But my research is also part of a larger project funded by the European Commission, on characterizing human language by structural complexity, and the question we seek to answer there, with a number of researchers from Holland, Germany, and England, is, what is it that makes humans so smart, compared to other species?  Is it just bigger brains? That might be the case. Or, are there particular ways that our brain operates that makes it very different from the way that other kinds of brains operate? 

Recursion has been proposed in human thinking to be the way that we think that other animals don't. That's very much an open empirical question, but let's say that it's right, in which case recursion once again underlies human thought, but doesn't have to make the jump into human language. You could in principle have a human language that is constrained by the culture, so that the language proper lacks recursion, but the brain has recursion. And that's very difficult to reconcile with Chomsky's ideas on where recursion comes from. Chomsky's absolutely correct to recognize the importance of recursion, but the role that he gives it, and the role that Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch give it, to me has got things backwards. In other words, rather than going from language to the brain, we have to have recursion in language, and then it starts to make its manifestation in other thought processes. It starts in the thought processes and it might or might not jump to language. It does not seem to be an essential property of language, certainly not the essential property of language.

One prediction that this makes in Pirahã follows from the suggestions of people who worked on number theory and the nature of number in human speech: that counting systems—numerical systems—are based on recursion, and that this recursion follows from recursion in the language. This predicts in turn that if a language lacked recursion, then that language would also lack a number system and a counting system. I've claimed for years that the Pirahã don't have numbers or accounting, and this has been verified in two recent sets of experiments, one of which was published in Sciencethree years ago by Peter Gordon, arguing that the Pirahã don't count, and then a new set of experiments which was just carried out in January by people from Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, which establishes pretty clearly that the Pirahã have no numbers, and, again, that they don't count at all.

So the evidence is still being collected, the claims that I have made about Pirahã lacking recursion and the fact that Pirahã is an evidence that there probably isn't a need for universal grammar. Contrary to Chomsky's proposal that universal grammar is the best way to think about where language comes from, another possibility is just that humans have different brains that are different globally from those of other species, that they have a greater general intelligence that can be exploited for all sorts of purposes in human thinking and human problem-solving. And one of the biggest problems we have to solve is how to communicate with other people—our conspecifics—and communication with our conspecifics is a problem that's often solved by recursion, but it doesn't have to be solved that way, it can be solved in other ways, especially in very small societies where so much information is implicit and held in common.

The ongoing investigation of these claims and alternatives to universal grammar, an architectonic effect of culture on grammar as whole, and the implications of this for the way that we've thought about language for the last 50 years are serious. If I am correct then the research so ably summarized in Steve Pinker's book The Language Instinct might not be the best way to think about things. Maybe there is no language instinct. So this is very controversial, and a lot more research has to be done. My colleagues and I are writing grants to test these claims. The only way that you can check out what I am saying is just to test the claims. Clearly formulate the claims and counterproposals, and go out and test them. If Everett's right, they ought to have this; and if he's wrong, we ought to find this. It's very simple conceptually to test the claims; you just have the logistical problems of the Amazon and a group that's monolingual and speaks no language but their own.

I don't think Pirahã is the only language that exhibits these qualities. What I think is that a lot of people are just like me in my beginning years of work there; they are given a set of categories to work with from their theories, and are told, these are the categories that languages have. So if you don't find a certain category, you just have to keep looking according to the theory. It takes a lot of courage, or, as in my case, frustration more than courage to say, Look, I'm not finding these things, so I'm just going to say they don't have the categories the theory predicts. Period. Say I am right about this. What are the implications? 

I think that if we look at other groups—maybe groups in New Guinea and Australia, and some groups in Africa—what we have to find are groups that have been isolated, for various reasons, from larger cultures. The Pirahã's isolation is due to their very strong sense of superiority, and disdain for other cultures. Far from thinking of themselves as inferior because they lack counting, they consider their way of life the best possible way of life, and so they're not interested in assimilating other values.

They have another interesting value, which is "no coercion." That's one of the strongest Pirahã values; no coercion; you don't tell other people what to do.

I originally went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã, to see them all become Christians, to translate the New Testament into their language. My only degree was an undergraduate degree from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and I went down there with the knowledge of New Testament Greek and a little bit of anthropology and linguistics. 

When I first started working with the Pirahã, I realized that I needed more linguistics if I was going to understand their language. When I began to tell them the stories from the Bible, they didn't have much of an impact. I wondered, was I telling the story incorrectly?  Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus?  How tall is he?  When did he tell you these things?  And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this?  

I started thinking about what I had been doing all along, which was, give myself a social environment in which I could say things that I really didn't have any evidence for—assertions about religion and beliefs that I had in the Bible. And because I had this social environment that supported my being able to say these things, I never really got around to asking whether I knew what I was talking about. Whether there was any real empirical evidence for these claims. 

The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn't been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs. At the same time, I had started a Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of Campinas in southern Brazil, and I was now in the middle of a group of very intelligent Brazilian intellectuals, who were always astounded that someone at a university doing a Ph.D. in linguistics could believe in the things I claimed to believe in at the time. So it was a big mixture of things involving the Pirahã, and at some point I realized that not only do I not have any evidence for these beliefs, but they have absolutely no applicability to these people, and my explanation of the universe.

I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do?  And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say?  He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just always were here. They have no concept of God. They have individual spirits, but they believe that they have seen these spirits, and they believe they see them regularly. In fact, when you look into it, these aren't sort of half-invisible spirits that they're seeing, they just take on the shape of things in the environment. They'll call a jaguar a spirit, or a tree a spirit, depending on the kinds of properties that it has. "Spirit" doesn't really mean for them what it means for us, and everything they say they have to evaluate empirically. This is what I hadn't been doing, and this challenged the faith that I thought I had, to the extent that I realized that it wasn't honest for me to continue to claim to believe these things when I realized how little investigation I had done into the nature of the things I claimed to believe.

I went to Brazil in 1977 as a missionary. I started my graduate program in 1979. By 1982, I was pretty sure that I didn't believe in the tenets of Christianity or any other religion or creeds based on the supernatural. But there's a social structure when you're a missionary, one that includes the income for you and your entire family as well as all of the relationships you've built up over the years. All the people you know and like and depend on are extremely religious and fundamentalist in their religion. It's very difficult to come out and say, "I don't believe this stuff any more." When I did say that, which was probably 13 years later, it had severe consequences for me personally. It's a difficult decision for anyone. I have a couple of friends whom I've told that it must be something like what it's like to come out as gay, to finally admit to your family that your values are just very very different from theirs.

My wife is still a missionary in Brazil to the Pirahã, and we've been separated for three years, and my view is pretty much irreconcilable with hers. It's difficult—it means that I don't go to that village when she's there. I don't go there and tell the Pirahãs not to believe in Jesus or anything like that. Actually I don't need to tell them that, because there's no danger that they ever will. They just find the entire concept—our beliefs—useless for them.

They wouldn't find the Pope remotely impressive; they would find his clothes very impractical, and they would find it very funny. I took a Pirahã to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, for health reasons once, to go to a hospital, and I took him to the Presidential Palace. As the president of Brazil was coming out, there was all this fanfare and I said, That's the chief of all Brazilians. Uh huh. Can we go eat now?  He was totally uninterested; the whole concept just sounds silly to them.

The first time I took a Pirahã on an airplane, I got a similar reaction. I was flying a man out for health reasons; he had a niece who needed surgery and he was accompanying her. We're flying above the clouds, and I know that he's never seen clouds from the top before, so I point down and I say, those are clouds down there. Uh huh. He was completely uninterested; he acted like he flew in planes every day. The Pirahã are not that curious about what we have. They haven't shown interest in a number of things that other indigenous groups, even Amazonian groups, that have come out and had contact with in civilization for the first time are curious about. The Pirahã have been in regular contact for a couple of hundred years now, and they have assimilated almost nothing. It's very unusual.

The reason that I believe that the Pirahã are like this is because of the strong cultural values that they have—a series of cultural values. One principle is immediacy of experience; they aren't interested in things if they don't know the history behind them. If they haven't seen it done. But there's also just a strong conservative core to the culture; they don't change, and they don't change the environment around them much either. They don't make canoes. They live on the river, and they depend on canoes for their daily existence—someone's always fishing, someone's always crossing the river to hunt and gather—but they don't make canoes. If there are no Brazilian canoes, they'll take the bark off a tree and just sit in that and paddle across. And that's only good for one or two uses.

I brought in a Brazilian canoe master, and spent days with them and him in the jungle; we selected the wood, and made a dugout canoe. The Pirahã did all the labor—so they knew how to make a canoe, and I gave them the tools—but they came to me and they said, we need you to buy us another canoe. I said, well we have the tools now, and you guys can make canoes. But they said, Pirahã don't make canoes. And that was the end of it. They never made a canoe like the Brazilians, even though I know that some of them have the skills to do that.

In the 1700s, the first Catholic mission to the Amazon area made contact with the Pirahã and the related people, the Muras, and abandoned them after a few years as the most recalcitrant group they had ever encountered. Other missionaries have worked with the Pirahã since then. Protestant missionaries have worked with them since about 1958, and there's not a single convert, there's not a single bit of interest.

A lot of people say that I'm a failure as a missionary. A lot of missionaries say I'm a failure—my ex-wife thinks I'm a failure as a missionary—and the reason they give is, I don't have enough faith. If you have enough faith, the story goes, God will overcome all of these things. But if you say that you should know that god is up against some serious cultural barriers. The Pirahã have a cultural taboo against talking about the world in certain ways, and the Christian message violates these.

They have the other cultural value against coercion that I mentioned. Religion is all about coercion—telling people how they should live and giving them a list of rules to live by—and the Pirahã just don't have coercion in that form. If someone were really violent and disrupted the entire life of the community, they would be ostracized; they might even be killed. But that would be a very serious pathological case in the culture. By and large, they tolerate differences, and even children aren't told what they have to do that much. Life is hard enough; if children don't do what they have to do, they'll go hungry. There's just no place for the Western concept of religion in their culture at all.

When a group receives this much publicity; you get different reactions. First of all, you get a lot of people who want to go there and investigate, until they see how difficult it is to get there, and how in fact they don't speak Portuguese and it's going to take a couple of years to be able to communicate with the Pirahã, even at a fairly simple level. This discourages people.

There are also a number of people who are upset that the group that they've been working with for 10 or 15 or 20 years didn't get any publicity. Scientists—linguists and anthropologists in particular—are very reticent to say that one group is somehow more special than another group because if that's the case, then you've made discoveries that they haven't made. I really think that's probably right. I don't think the Pirahã are special in some deep sense. They're certainly very unusual, and they have characteristics that need to be explained, but all of the groups in the Amazon have different but equally interesting characteristics. I think that one reason we fail to notice, when we do field research, the fundamental differences between languages is because linguistic theory over the last 50 years—maybe even longer—has been primarily directed towards understanding how languages are alike, as opposed to how they are different. 

If we look at the differences between languages—not exclusively, because what makes them alike is also very very important—the differences can be just as important as the similarities. We have no place in modern linguistic theory for really incorporating the differences and having interesting things to say about the differences. So when you say that this language lacks X, we will say, well, that's just an exotic fact: so they lack it, no big deal. But when you begin to accumulate differences across languages around the world, maybe some of these things that we thought were so unusual aren't as unusual and could in fact turn out to be similarities. Or, the differences could be correlated with different components that we didn't expect before. Maybe there's something about the geography, or something about the culture, or something about other aspects of these people that account for these differences. Looking at differences doesn't mean you throw your hands up and say there's no explanation and that you have nothing more than a catalog of what exists in the world. But it does develop a very different way of looking at culture and looking at language.

Missionaries have gone to the Pirahãs, learned their language more or less, and then left after a few years. There is a Brazilian anthropologist, Marco Antonio Gonçalves, who teaches at the University of Rio. He spent 18 months off and on working with them, and he speaks the language at a very basic level. The tones are part of what make it so difficult for people who haven't had a lot of linguistic training, but it's just like Chinese, or Vietnamese, or Korean, in the fact that the tones are very important to the meanings of the words. This is really difficult for a lot of researchers without a significant linguistic background. I now have two researchers working with me from the University of Manchester: a Ph.D. student who's writing her Ph.D. on recursion or the absence thereof among the Pirahã; and a postdoc on a grant of mine whose research is looking at how well the Pirahã speak Portuguese, and if they do know some Portuguese, what kinds of grammatical characteristics does it have—does their Portuguese show anything that violates what I say about Pirahã itself? Both of these people, Jeanette Sakel and Engenie Stapert, are learning Pirahã, and I've encouraged them to learn the language, and given them some lessons.

What happens is with some people is that they go to the Pirahãs with me and I translate for them and help them get going. For people who do ongoing research of their own—many people have gone to the Pirahã with the idea that they're going to develop a multi-year research program and I'm going to be their partner every time they go. 

I don't have the time to go with every researcher who wants to work with the Pirahã; I have my own research agenda. I've tried to help them to start learning the language, and most people sort of disappear after that. Tecumseh Fitch went with me last summer and he would like to go again, and maybe he will. But I think that the best way for anyone to go again is to invest the time to learn enough of the language to do their own research. There's also the fact that if anybody has to go with me, people can then say that my influence is so pervasive that you could never test what I'm saying, because I'm behind every single experiment.

Peter Gordon and I were colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, and Peter did his Ph.D. at MIT in psychology, with a strong concern for numerosity. We were talking, and I said, there's a group that doesn't count—I work with a group that doesn't count—and he found that very difficult to believe, so he wanted to go do experiments. He went, and I helped him get going; he did the experiments, but his explanation for the reason that the Pirahã don't count is that they don't have words for numbers. They only have one to many. I claim that in fact they don't have any numbers. His idea is that the absence of counting in Pirahã has a Whorfian explanation—that there's a linguistic determinism: if you lack numbers, you lack counting—that is, that the absence of the words causes the absence of the concepts.   But this really doesn't explain a lot of things. There are a lot of groups that have been known not to have more than one to many—as soon as they got into a relationship where they needed it for trade, they borrowed the numbers from Portuguese or Spanish or English or whatever other language. 

The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board. So I don't think that the fact that they lack numbers is attributable to the linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, i.e. that language determines our thought—I don't really think that goes very far. It also doesn't explain their lack of color words, the simplest kinship system that's ever been documented, the lack of recursion, and the lack of quantifiers, and all of these other properties. Gordon has no explanation for the lack of these things, and he will just say, "I have no explanation, that's all a coincidence."

Some people have suggested that since this a small society it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that there's a lot of inbreeding, and that this has made one particular gene much more prevalent in the society. Maybe Pirahã uniqueness is genetic in origin. People have asked me to do DNA tests, but my research has already been attacked for being borderline racist, because I say that the people are so different. So the last thing that I want to do is be associated with DNA testing. Somebody else can go there and do that. I don't think they have a closed gene pool, even though it's a small group of people. River traders come up frequently, and it's not uncommon for Pirahã to trade sex for different items off the boat that they want. So I don't think that genetics is relevant at all here.

Most inhabitants of the Brazilian Amazon are descended from Brazilian Indians, but now they would just consider themselves Brazilians. The Brazilians the Pirahãs most often see have boats, and they just come up the Pirahãs' river to buy Brazil nuts. In exchange, they bring machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey and so forth. The Pirahãs are usually interested in acquiring these things. They don't accumulate Western goods, but if you've got consumables, the Pirahã might buy, say, two pounds of sugar, pour it in a bowl and eat it all at once. They're not going to put it on the shelf and save it; they'll just eat it when they get it.

It depends on the river trader, but sex is also a very common trade item. So you see these foreign babies being raised among the Pirahã. It's mainly the husband who works out the deal. Single women can negotiate on their own; wives wouldn't make that offer unless their husband negotiated it. In their dealings with outsiders, men take the lead, and the women won't usually come around unless they're called by Pirahã men. But promiscuity is not a problem for the Pirahã. It doesn't violate any values that they have.

I remember one time sitting in a hut with the Pirahã and they came and they said, we understand that you want to tell us about Jesus and that Jesus tells us that we should live certain ways. Since you love Jesus, this is an American thing—but we don't want to live like you. We want to live like Pirahã, and we do lots of other things that you don't do, and we don't want to be like you. They've noticed these characteristics, and they much prefer to have the values that they have.

The paper I wrote that has attracted all the attention is "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã," published in the anthropology journal, Current Anthropology, in 2005. It would have been almost impossible to get this article—for one thing, it was 25,000 words, and for another thing it was so controversial—in a linguistics journal. Also, I chose this journal because it has a much higher circulation than any linguistics journal. And also the anthropology journal Current Anthropology invites commentators, a feature I really like. In my case, they had eight well-known linguists and anthropologists and psychologists comment on the paper. And the press picked up on it. You can never predict, obviously, when the press is going to pick up on something. But it started getting reported in magazines. And a lot of it was twisted; it wasn't exactly what I said, but it got a lot of play on radio, was in a lot of magazines. And everyone had the spin that this was—in fact I say it in the article—that this is a very strong counter-example to the kinds of claims that Chomsky makes. And I knew that there would be a response eventually, as it got more and more press.

David Pesetsky is a professor at MIT, Andrew Nevins was a student at MIT who now holds a temporary appointment in Linguistics at Harvard, and Cilene Rodrigues is a Brazilian linguist who I think is doing her Ph.D. at MIT. They decided that they would write a reply to my article. The interesting thing is that I'm the main source of data on Pirahã. Now, the best way to check out what I'm saying would be to get some research funds to go down there and do experiments and test this stuff. But what they decided to do was to look at my doctoral dissertation, and where I describe the grammar of Pirahã, and find inconsistencies between my doctoral dissertation and what I'm saying now. And there are some. And I say in the Current Anthropology article that there are inconsistencies, and that the 2005 article supersedes my previous work. And all of those decisions to change my mind on this or that analytical point were based on a lot of thought about what I had said previously and how it compared to my current knowledge.

My doctoral dissertation was written when I was using a certain set of grammatical categories common among most linguists, and I did my very best to make Pirahã come out and look like a "normal" language. So there are a couple of small examples of things that look like recursion in my doctoral dissertation. In fact I call them that. So the authors of the rebuttal dwell on these discrepancies. And then they try to counter my claims in the paper. Also, they refer to some unpublished studies by Steven Sheldon in which it is claimed that Pirahã has color words and number words. And they refer to an introduction to a dissertation on Pirahã that says that they speak Portuguese. And you do find these things in the studies they cite. But these are all written by people who either were not professional linguists, or who didn't speak the language. If you take the color words, Sheldon did in fact claim that the Pirahã had color words. But if you look at them, "mii sai," which he translated as "red," means "like blood." All of the color words in fact are just descriptions. This looks like blood, this looks like water, this looks like the sky, or this looks like a fire, or something like this. There can be any number of expressions. With regard to their ability to speak Portuguese, the Pirahã men do understand very simple Portuguese, just enough to trade with the river traders. Now if I went to Paris, I could probably get directions to the nearest bathroom, but that doesn't mean I speak French. I don't. That's roughly the Pirahãs' level of Portuguese. 

So Pesetsky, Nevins, and Rodrigues were very careful in their criticisms, they worked very long and hard, they took months to do this. Then they posted it to a Web site called Ling Buzz, and it started being downloaded because of all the press on Pirahã—in the first few days there were 700 downloads. Every day it's getting dozens more downloads. I was actually trying to write something else at the time when I saw the reply, but I reluctantly put that aside to reply to their work. I replied to them point by point. The only part of their article that irritated me was the insinuations that because I focused on negative aspects of Pirahã, I was perhaps racist. They didn't use the term "racist," but they insinuated that I might have a negative view of the Pirahã as a people because I was only focusing on the gaps in the language. But I pointed out that I published over 40 articles on Pirahã, and a book, and that all of those mainly talked about things they did have, not the gaps that they had. I put my reply on Ling Buzz, that's now the top-loaded paper on Ling Buzz, so those two papers are still getting downloaded a lot, and there's a debate going on. I don't know if they're planning a reply to my reply, but the way things go, they probably are.

When I saw this, I wrote the three of them, and I said, you've put me in the interesting situation of pitting Dan Everett at 55 against Dan Everett at 26. Because, I said, all the data you use are my data. So I'll just have to explain why when I wrote my doctoral dissertation I didn't know as much about Pirahã as I know now. Their objection is that even though I published extensively, I haven't published on all of these things previously. And so one of the many projects that I'm engaged in right now, along with several other people, mainly this group of researchers at MIT, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is an experimental grammar of Pirahã, where we basically rewrite the grammar of Pirahã and do experiments to substantiate or test as many points as we can. If I had written all of this before I came out with the claims, I would never have come out with the claims. You have to make the claims and see the controversies, see what people say about them, to be sure you have the data. So I turned over all of my data to other researchers, and they're in the process of digitizing it, and eventually all these data will be on the Web, translated—it'll take a couple of years, but then you won't actually have to go to the Pirahã, you can look at the data, and you can search through the data and see if you can find counter-examples, or find other things that I've missed, and I'm sure people will.

When I was interviewed for Der Spiegel, I was at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and my next-door neighbor was Tecumseh Fitch. We were talking about this quite a bit—he was my next-door neighbor both at the Institute and in the apartment building that we lived in, so we talked quite a bit, and went out a few times—and he made a comment about the fact that he didn't really believe the significance of what I was saying to the Der Spiegel reporter, and so I wrote a reply to him, copying Noam Chomsky and Mark Hauser. And I actually thought that Tecumseh would be the one to respond, because that's who the letter was directed to, but in fact I immediately got a long response from Chomsky, followed by other long emails.

Initially it was a very interesting exchange. I know Noam fairly well, I've known his work most of my career and I've read everything he's ever written in linguistics—I could have written his responses myself. I don't mean to be flippant, but they were re-statements of things that everybody knows that he believes. I think that it's difficult for him to see that there is any alternative to what he's saying. He said to me there is no alternative to universal grammar; it just means the biology of humans that underlies language. But that's not right, because there are a lot of people who believe that the biology of humans underlies language but that there is no specific language instinct. In fact at the Max Planck, Mike Tomasello has an entire research lab and one of the best primate zoos in the world, where he studies the evolution of communication, and human language, without believing in a language instinct or a universal grammar.

I've mainly followed Mike's research there because we talk more or less the same language, and he's more interested in directly linguistic questions than just primatology, but there's a lot of really interesting work in primatology—looking at the acquisition of communication and finding similarities that we might not have thought were there if we believe in a universal grammar.

I think that the way that Chomskyan theories developed over the last 50 years has made it completely untestable now. It's not clear what usefulness there is in the notion of universal grammar. It appeals to the public at large, and it used to appeal to linguists, but as you work more and more with it, there's no way to test it—I can't think of a single experiment—in fact I asked Noam this in an e-mail, what is a single prediction that universal grammar makes that I could falsify? How could I test it? What prediction does it make? And he said, It doesn't make any predictions; it's a field of study, like biology. 

Now that is not quite right. No scientist can get by without believing in biology, but it's quite possible to study human language without believing in universal grammar. So UG is really not a field of study in the same sense. I think the history of science shows that the people who develop a theory and who are responsible for the development of the theory are rarely the people who come forward and say: whoops, I was wrong, we need to actually work at it another way, this guy over here had the right idea. It's rare for that to happen. Noam is not likely to say this.

I want to have well-designed experiments to test my claims on recursion; I want to have mores studies of the Pirahã grammar from people working outside my influence. The more people who can look at this independently, the more likely it is that others are going to start to believe this, because I think it's going to be shown to be correct. If it's wrong, that's also important. The tests have to be done, and then if there is evidence that I might be onto something, we have to look at other languages. And other languages in similar situations where they've been cut off for one reason or another from outside influences for long periods of time. And re-examine those languages in light of the possibility that languages can vary more than we thought. And maybe the categories that we have aren't the best categories.

We need more fieldwork. Linguists have gotten away from fieldwork over the last 50 years. There's more interest in endangered languages now than there was a few years ago, but there's just now beginning to be a resurgence of the field work ethic among linguists, and the idea that we can't figure out everything that we need to know just by looking at grammars that have been written, without going and seeing the language in the cultural context.

And that's really the biggest research question that I have for the future: What evidence is there that culture can exercise an architectonic effect on the grammar —that it can actually shape the very nature of grammar, and not simply trigger parameters.

Reality Club Discussion

Robert D. Van Valin
Professor of Linguistics at the Uniersity at Buffalo

The dispute over Pirahã is curious in many respects, not least with regard to the fact that Everett is not the first linguist to claim that a language lacks embedded clauses and therewith recursion. In a series of important papers published in the late 70's, the late MIT linguist Kenneth Hale argued that certain Australian Aboriginal languages lack embedding of the type found in Indo-European languages in their complex sentences and furthermore that one of them, Warlpiri, has a completely 'flat' syntactic structure. The latter claim was amended somewhat in the published version of the paper, but the point about the complex sentences remained valid. In the mid-1980's, William Foley, a linguist at the University of Sydney, described Iatmul, a language of Papua New Guinea, as having non-hierarchical clause combining, i.e. no embedded of clauses in complex sentences, hence no recursion in the syntax. So the question arises, given that such claims go back a good thirty years, and the most important of them was from a former colleague of Chomsky's, why has Everett's claim engendered such controversy?

There are two reasons. The first is that it is only recently that Chomsky elevated the concept of recursion in the syntax to being the defining feature of human language. Prior to this, claims such as Hale's and Foley's would not have generated such interest, although Hale's claims did have theoretical consequences, albeit with respect to different issues. Chomsky stands at the end of a long and very distinguished career, and his current theoretical work and the claims about language evolution and specifically about syntactic recursion being the key property of human language are the capstones of that career. For them to be called into question now is a serious challenge to Chomsky, his work, and his intellectual legacy. Everett has raised important scientific questions, and they deserve serious and dispassionate investigation. Pesetsky et al.'s reply to Everett and his response to their criticisms are important steps in that direction, as are the other investigations of Pirahã that have been carried out recently and are planned.

One of the striking features of this controversy has been how little dispassionate discussion there actually has been. Indeed, both Pesetsky in his commentary and Everett in his response call for a calmer tone to the discussion. The non-linguist might well wonder, why so much sound and fury over a claim about syntax, of all things? The reason for this is summarized by Pinker in a comment quoted in the article in The New Yorker (p. 131):

There's a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan paradigm He's a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn't feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God's truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn't actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.

So, first of all, Everett's claim is a direct challenge to the "guru's" teachings, and second, Everett himself was once one of Chomsky "disciples" (he was once a leading figure in Chomskyan linguistics in Brazil and spent time at MIT) and is now apostate. A former true believer is always attacked in a way that those who were never believers are not. There is a further factor. Chomsky is perhaps best known to non-linguists for his prolific political writings, and while he has always taken great pains to keep his political work separate from his linguistic work, many people take both of them as two parts of a single oeuvre, so that an attack on his linguistic work is also perceived as an attack on his political work. This is particularly true in other countries, especially in those countries in which Chomsky's trenchant criticisms of the US government resonate with local attitudes toward the US. 

I would like to revisit one of the points I made in my earlier contribution in light of one of the arguments made in Pesetsky's contribution. He writes:

For example, Pirahã appears to position its subordinate clauses after the verb—despite the tendency elsewhere in the language for the verb to come last in the sentence. Everett used this fact as an argument that what look like subordinate clauses in Pirahã are really independent sentences. This claim formed part of an argument that Pirahã lacks "recursion", which in turn was supposed to reflect Pirahã's special cultural restrictions. In fact, however, the grammatical property that he had identified in Pirahã is extraordinarily common in the languages of the world—and has no detectable correlation with recursion or culture. We offered German, Hindi, and Wappo (a language of California) as examples of languages with this property, and could have given many more examples. No cultural thread links the speakers of these various languages. (Who has ever accused German speakers, for example, of living exclusively in the "here and now"?)

There are three significant issues in this passage.

First, Pesetsky does not refer to Everett's counter-arguments to his claim that there are subordinate clauses in Pirahã given in the Pesetsky, et al. paper; he simply assumes that there are, without confronting Everett's arguments in his response.

Second, in comparing languages like German, Hindi, and Wappo with Pirahã, the crucial point is not that all four of these languages permit a clause to occur after the verb, which is true, but rather that in Pirahã it is the onlyoption. Furthermore, as I noted with respect to Lakhota, the two possible placements of a linked clause, either before the main verb in an embedded structure, or in a flat, conjoined structure, are considered to be communicatively equivalent by native speakers. Thus, the lack of a particular structural option in Pirahã is not evidence of any kind of deficiency with respect to communication or with regard to semantic complexity.

Third, Everett does not claim that the fact that subordinate clauses follow the verb in German or other languages has anything to do with the kind of cultural constraint he proposes for Pirahã. The reason why this phenomenon is so widespread in verb-final languages is that it allows speakers to avoid what are called 'center-embedded' structures, which are difficult to process. An example of center-embedding from English is 'The cat [that the mouse [that ran away] saw] purred', which is composed of 'the cat purred' and 'the mouse saw the cat' and 'the mouse ran away.' This sentence is technically grammatical but very difficult to understand. Similar structures are created in verb-final languages if, for example, a subordinate clause follows the subject and precedes the verb. This point is, for languages which allow both options for the placement of subordinate clauses, there is a good processing reason why they prefer the post-verbal option. (Hence the comment, "Who has ever accused German speakers, for example, of living exclusively in the "here and now"? is an attempt to ridicule a claim which they imply follows from Everett's analysis, but which does not.)

What is so striking about Pirahã is not only that the language does not have the preverbal option, which languages which have true embedding do, but also that there is no evidence that in the two-clause structures that the second clause is in any way grammatically dependent on the first. The language is definitely exceptional in this regard.

Daniel L. Everett
Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began

David Pesetsky's reply on the Edge corrects some errors I made with regard to the professional background of Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues. As he says, they are both established and experienced researchers. I in no way wished to indicate otherwise. They are all deservedly respected scientists.

I also do not want to give the impression, as I seem to have given to David, that I believe that their long criticism of my work is completely blinded by their own theoretical commitments. I do think that the history of science shows that our theoretical commitments deeply affect our conclusions, but certainly not entirely.

Now, to get to the point, in the article that Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues wrote and posted on the LingBuzz site, they purport to show, as David repeats in his Edge posting, that my arguments for the lack of recursion in Pirahã do not go through, based on my earlier data, i.e. from my PhD dissertation.

But data, as I discuss in my reply and as Chomsky has said in many different publications, data 'do not wear their analyses on their sleeves'. The way we analyze a sentence from any language depends to a large degree on the meaning that we assign to that sentence. Meaning and form are carefully linked in all linguistic theories. So if the linguist assigns the wrong meaning to an utterance, even a meaning slightly off from the speakers' intended meaning, the structure that is assigned to that utterance will be wrong as well.

The sentences that I record in my PhD dissertation are all fairly accurate as recorded utterances, but often their meanings were too subtle for my understanding of the language at the time I was writing my PhD dissertation, based on 14 months of field research and a beginning knowledge of the language. Long before I wrote my Current Anthropologyarticle I had corrected the mistranslations of examples, but had not written a paper to discuss the implications of these more accurate translations. TheCurrent Anthropology article did discuss these and I discussed them further in my reply to Pesetsky, Nevins, and Rodrigues. But, as Pesetsky points out, it is true, trivially so in fact, that when one makes claims of the kind I have made, no one article provides enough space to thoroughly document and argue for all the conclusions in it. This is why I, along with colleagues from MIT, University of Manchester, and University of Edinburgh, plan to write a much more detailed grammar of Pirahã over the next couple of years, based partially on experimentation to test all the more controversial claims about Pirahã.

Ultimately, though, I am puzzled by David's reply. First, I have replied to every single one of the criticisms he raises in his Edge reply in my paper on LingBuzz. There is not a single argument that he raises on his Edge posting that hasn't been answered. The Brazilian anthropologist he cites has indeed studied Piraha myths, but only in the sense of stories based on immediate experience that bind the Pirahas together. That anthropologist does not have a single text in Piraha on creation. I have stated this many times and Pesetsky has failed to note it each time.

Moreover, if you do not do fieldwork, you are an armchair linguist. That is simply the way the world works. You study languages in the field or from your armchair. This is not a moral judgment, though it becomes relevant when non-fieldworkers opine about the nature of fieldwork. David has never done fieldwork on any language, nor has his co-authors, that remotely approaches the Piraha situation in being monolingual, extremely difficult access, and so on. This is not to say that there is not a lot of important work that can be done without field research. But it does mean that Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues are much more sanguine about interpreting examples, such as those from my PhD dissertation, at face-value, apparently not realizing how hard it is to translate even simply examples in a field work situation and how being even just a little bit off in those examples' translations can dramatically affect the picture of the grammar that emerges ultimately.

Ultimately, once again, Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues have not added anything to our knowledge of Piraha or my work on Piraha except to show that I currently disagree with my PhD dissertation.

It is true that I am one of the few people that have worked on Piraha. But for just about any grammar of any smaller, difficult to access language we have in the literature, there is only one or a small handful of people that have studied the languages in question. It is as likely that we have many 'false positives' in these grammars (like my dissertation) that support the idea of recursion as it is that we have false negatives (as Pesetsky would have readers think of my 2005 paper) against recursion. More experiments are needed on all fronts. I have made my claims. What is needed are new experiments, not an expression of dismay that my dissertation is different from my current work.

Finally, I should say that the great, now deceased, MIT linguist, Kenneth Hale, claimed more than thirty years ago that it looked like several Australian languages lacked syntactic embedding (and a fortiori recursion), though he never investigated the implications or the nature of this claim as thoroughly as has been done for Pirahã. 

Several Australian linguists believe that Hale was correct, and papers are beginning to emerge which support the idea that some Australian languages lack recursion too. Pirahã is unlikely, therefore, to be the only counterexample to the claims of Chomsky and others on the centrality of recursion.

I only hope that the debate, as David urges in his posting, will become more civil and less emotionally charged. This is just science, after all. Life is enriched by science, but is a lot more than that.

David Pesetsky
Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT

1. When Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues and I began discussing Everett's 2005 paper in Current Anthropology, our goals were simple and limited. Everett had described a set of "gaps" in Pirahã language and culture, and suggested that these gaps must be attributed to the effects of a cultural Immediate Experience Principle. In our lengthy reply to Everett's paper, posted to the LingBuzz website (and submitted for publication), we focused on two main questions:

• Had the gaps had really been shown to exist in the first place? We concluded that in several key instances, the answer was no. Evidence for many of these gaps was weak or nonexistent.

• Do we need the cultural Immediate Experience Principle to account for the gaps that did seem to be real? Here too our answer was negative.

Though Everett had called the Pirahã "very surprising from just about any grammarian's perspective", that is not what we found. In almost every case, Pirahã looked just like many other languages of the world—languages spoken in many different kinds of societies.

For example, Pirahã appears to position its subordinate clauses after the verb—despite the tendency elsewhere in the language for the verb to come last in the sentence. Everett used this fact as an argument that what look like subordinate clauses in Pirahã are really independent sentences. This claim formed part of an argument that Pirahã lacks "recursion", which in turn was supposed to reflect Pirahã's special cultural restrictions. In fact, however, the grammatical property that he had identified in Pirahã is extraordinarily common in the languages of the world—and has no detectable correlation with recursion or culture. We offered German, Hindi, and Wappo (a language of California) as examples of languages with this property, and could have given many more examples. No cultural thread links the speakers of these various languages. (Who has ever accused German speakers, for example, of living exclusively in the "here and now"?) Consequently, there is no reason to attribute the word order of Pirahã embedded clauses to any particularly remarkable grammatical property or to any property of culture.

This was typical of our initial findings. There were other issues as well. Much of the Pirahã data included in the Current Anthropology paper itself seemed too sparse to support any conclusions. Other arguments were left incomplete. Often the discussion seemed "personalized", presenting assertions in lieu of argument. Nonetheless, we could imagine that we were dealing here with a flaw in presentation, not a flaw in the actual research. Perhaps a broader examination of other available material on Pirahã would fill in the missing pieces and strengthen the arguments.

Consequently, we attempted to integrate the data from Current Anthropology with other published data available from the language. When we did so, however, we reached even more strongly negative conclusions. Where we previously found certain arguments weak, we now began to find actual counterevidence to them. For example, though Everett had claimed that apparent "subordinate clauses" in Pirahã were actually independent sentences, the literature turned out to offer crucial examples that simply could not be analyzed that way. One might imagine that what looks like the Pirahã counterpart of the single sentence "He watched the foreigner catching fish" is actually two separate sentences: "He watched the foreigner. He was catching fish." But one could hardly give the same analysis for the Pirahã counterpart to the English "He does not want me to go", which cannot be said to mean the same as, say, "He does not want me. I go."—or any similar two-sentence counterpart. Consequently, it looked like we truly were dealing with a subordinate clause.

By the time we concluded our research, we could find no remaining arguments for Everett's claims about subordinate clauses, and several good arguments against them. We reached much the same conclusions in other areas of Pirahã grammar crucial to Everett's general claims.

Our findings also touched on the cultural claims. The Brazilian anthropologist Marco Antonio Gonçalves turned out to have written two lengthy scholarly books in Portuguese, in which he recounts and discusses Pirahã mythic narratives, including a (re)creation myth. These reports seemed to contradict Everett's claims about the Pirahã's lack of mythology and their lack of interest in creations and origins.

Here then were our conclusions. The real grammatical gaps of Pirahã seemed to have no connection to culture. Other claimed gaps did not seem to be real. The cultural principle invoked to explain these gaps was not needed, and there were open questions about the cultural description as well. Finally, Everett had also asserted that his findings about Pirahã had broad implications for all sorts of deep issues in linguistics and related fields. If we were correct, no broader discussion was called for.


2. Everett has replied to us formally in an article also posted on the LingBuzz website, and less formally in interviews and articles like the one here. Unfortunately, much of this discussion strikes me as beside the point.

Everett often writes, for example, as if the institutional and intellectual allegiances of his intellectual opponents should influence our evaluation of their arguments—and even the evaluation of their data. Among these intellectual opponents he numbers not only us, but also his own former self. It is in this light that he attempts to discredit his own detailed sketch of Pirahã syntax and morphology from the late 1980s, still the most important source for any researcher seeking hard published data about the language. "The 2005 article supersedes my previous work", he writes. The only reasons offered for ignoring the earlier work seem to be the following: (1) the earlier work presents data that appear to contradict Everett's current claims; and (2) the earlier work was written when the author held beliefs about language that he no longer does (described as the "theoretical baggage" of "Chomskyan theory"). "I did my very best to make Pirahã come out and look like a 'normal' language," Everett writes. If our paper is correct, of course, Everett succeeded because Pirahã actually is a "normal" language.

The criticism of us that Everett offers rather politely on in his article here has not been expressed so politely elsewhere. In Everett's reply, for example, we are called, for example, "armchair linguists", our work is denigrated as "armchair speculation" colored by "a vested interest in the Chomskyan framework", and our attempts to suggest alternative analyses of Everett's data are repeatedly parodied as instances of "eyeballing".

Even our professional resumes are apparently a topic for discussion—and this is probably the place to correct some errors. Everett in his article here onEdge describes my coauthor Andrew Nevins as a former "student at MIT who now holds a temporary appointment in Linguistics at Harvard". In fact, he is a regular member of the Harvard faculty. Likewise, Everett describes Cilene Rodrigues as "a Brazilian linguist who I think is doing her Ph.D. at MIT". In fact, she received her PhD in 2004 from the University of Maryland, and is currently teaching at the University of Campinas (Everett's own doctoral alma mater). In other words, we are all experienced researchers, and we are not all from MIT.

Finally, Everett claims that our paper contains insinuations of racism. This unfortunate charge once again gives a personal twist to a discussion that we carefully kept non-personal. In the final section of our paper, we wrote of a "more general discomfort with the overall presentation of Pirahã language and culture" in the Current Anthropology article, and noted that we shared this discomfort with a previous commentator on the paper who had called for a "more balanced picture". In contrast to this commentator, however, we pointed out that Everett's picture of Pirahã culture might actually be the balanced picture. But we also noted that the shakiness of the grammatical evidence for Pirahã's "gaps" might be grounds to take special care with sensitive cultural characterizations. As an example of what we had in mind, we quoted a paragraph about the Pirahã from Everett's own archived Pirahã website (along with several captions from the same webpage). To judge from the version of Everett's complaint presented in his reply, it is to these quotations that he most strongly objects. He calls them "contrived and decontextualized".

I wish I could invite readers of Edge to visit the Pirahã website and judge the charge of "decontextualization" for themselves. Unfortunately, I cannot. For some time now, any reader who attempts to access the Pirahã site sees a page with the text "Blocked Site Error". According to information provided by the archivists, this message signals the blocking of the site "at the request of the site owner". The blocking of these pages has also eliminated free access to all but one of the previously available Pirahã texts, and has prevented access to what (I believe) was the only publicly available Pirahã-English word list—two important research tools.


3. I still hope it is possible to look forward to a calmer, more reasonable discussion of Pirahã grammar and culture, rather than what has unfolded. If the discussion improves, who knows—perhaps even the press will get the hint and report more carefully. Perhaps we will begin to see fewer articles with nonsense like the Chicago Tribune's claim that that Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch's (2002) article was a reply to Everett's (2005) article, and their statement that the Pirahã "don't use recursives". (There's no such thing as "a recursive"!) And perhaps we will even see a healthier, more relevant discussion of opposing views such as ours.

Robert D. Van Valin
Professor of Linguistics at the Uniersity at Buffalo

There are a number of points worth emphasizing with respect to Dan Everett's claims about Pirahã. First, and most important, he is not claiming that Pirahã speakers are in any way limited in what they can say by the lack of recursion in the syntax. Saying 'John has a brother. His brother has a house' communicates the same content as 'John's brother's house', albeit with less perspicuous packaging. The fact that Pirahã speakers can formulate such utterances supports Everett's claim that they can form recursive semantic propositions, which are then expressed in this non-recursive way in the syntax. There are analogues in other languages. I worked for many years with speakers of Lakhota, the language of the Sioux, which definitely has recursive structures in its syntax. If one asked a Lakhota speaker if the Lakhota equivalent of 'I know that Bill stole the money', with 'that Bill stole the money' as an embedded clause, is a possible Lakhota sentence, he or she would say that it is. If, on the other hand, one asked a Lakhota speaker how he or she would say that sentence, they would respond 'Bill stole the money, and I know it', which is exactly the same kind of non-recursive structure found in Pirahã. Given a choice, the Lakhota speakers I have worked with always chose the non-recursive structure. There are good reasons why they would want to avoid such embedded clauses, given certain features of Lakhota syntax, but the point is that speakers find it to be communicatively equivalent to the recursive structure.

John Searle long ago proposed a principle of effability, which states that all languages are capable of expressing the same content. Despite the lack of recursion, Pirahã speakers are indeed able to express complex propositions. This is relevant to Chomsky's claim that recursion is the key feature of human language. Chomsky's approach treats syntax as the main backbone of language, to which other aspects of language are secondary. Because speakers are capable of formulating complex recursive propositions, this must, given Chomsky's view of the centrality and primacy of syntax to language, be realized in terms of recursion in the syntax.

Chomsky has long maintained that the purpose of human language is to permit the free, creative expression of human thought, and it follows that there must be recursion in the syntax in order for the expression of complex propositions to be possible. He has also long denied that the communicative function of language is in any way relevant to an understanding of the structure of language, maintaining in fact the the structure of language is dysfunctional with respect to communication. Now, suppose one took the opposite view from Chomsky and claimed that the function of communication is relevant to the understanding of the structure of language and that in analyzing language one should treat it as a system exhibiting an complex interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics (the principles governing the use of language in context).

From this perspective, the formulation of complex propositions in the semantics, reflecting complex ideas and concepts, need not be reflected in only one property in the linguistic system, namely recursive syntax. If one of the functions of language is the conveying of complex propositional information, then one should take the whole system into account in evaluating whether the principle of effability is satisfied in Pirahã, and on Everett's account, it is.

This leads to a second point. Because the principle of effability is satisfied with respect to complex propositions (the expression of number concepts is another matter, but this issue is easier to resolve than the recursion one, with independent work confirming Everett's claim), it is misleading and inaccurate to accuse Everett of denigrating the Pirahã language or its speakers in any way. While the idea of cultural constraints on the grammar of a language is anathema to many linguists, as the reaction to Everett's work clearly shows, it is difficult to see what other explanation there could be for the lacunae in the system. It cannot be that there is anything genetically different about the Pirahã.

If a Pirahã child were taken at birth from the tribe and raised by a Brazilian family, he or she would learn Portuguese like any other child, with all of its features. There is in fact such a case approximating this situation, and interestingly, when the child as a teenager moved back to live among the Pirahã, she stopped speaking Portuguese, even refusing to speak it, did not use recursive structures, did not count, etc. This can only be explained in terms of cultural constraints and social conventions, since she clearly had those concepts from her learning of Portuguese.

Daniel L. Everett
Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began

I appreciate Steve Pinker's response to my work, even though it is negative, because it provides me yet another opportunity to clarify my statements on Pirahã. It is always interesting to me to see how people read into what I am saying about Pirahã based on their own theoretical backgrounds. The influence of our theoretical and other biases on the way that we interpret the world around us is further illustration of my general point that language and grammar can be deeply affected by culture. But let me be more specific. I will respond to each section of his criticism.

1. Self-contradictory: Pinker is persuaded by his own reading of my work and the criticism of my work in the paper by Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues, that my recent work contradicts my previous work in ways that cannot be attributed merely to my previous theoretical baggage, i.e. that I worked within Chomskyan theory. The first example he gives is that the Pirahãs rich and textured beliefs about spirits cannot be fit into my principle of immediacy of experience.

But there is nothing in the immediacy of experience principle — which, by the way, is merely a very small part of the intricate web of values of Pirahã culture — that claims that the Pirahãs cannot have detailed explanations of the world they live in. This principle claims simply that they have to have direct evidence of the things they talk about. And there is no claim that this principle is unique to the Pirahãs. The claim is, rather, that this principle constrains Pirahã language in ways we don't see in other cultures.

Not that other cultures don't have similar values. It is the interaction of cultural values and grammar that makes each language unique in a profound sense. Pirahãs do see spirits. I have seen an entire village yelling at a spirit on a beach on which they claim to see a spirit but where I can see nothing. But they also believe that spirits manifest themselves as different animals and people. And seeing such an animal counts as seeing a spirit, literally. This is not at all uncommon of course, cross-culturally. So a Pirahã can see a jaguar and say that they have seen a spirit and believe it, depending on their spiritual state at the time. I have almost lost my life by going out to 'scare off' a spirit at their request at 3AM, only to realize that the spirit was a jaguar!

I claim that the Pirahãs lack recursion in the syntax. I made no such claim about their semantics or their discourse, for example. In fact, I have given many examples of recursion in discourse as different ideas are contained in others within the main and subordinate story lines. My claim is about syntax. And the examples that Pinker uses to show self-contradiction in my account were mistranslated (by me) initially.

The word translated 'but' in his example does not mean that exactly and can be used in isolated clauses as in 'But I give this to you' or 'But I am watching the river'. In these cases, what the speaker means is that what I am doing violates your expectations (since giving normally involves an expectation of receiving something in return, in this case there is nothing expected in return; and in the second case it means that the Pirahã is idly watching the water and has no other purpose.

Pinker's (and others') reaction to the idea that my present account could be violating my previous accounts shows a profound lack of familiarity with the nature of linguistic fieldwork, something that none of the major critics of my work so far have had any experience with.

2.I think that it probably is correct that hunters and gatherers generally attribute, by necessity, more importance to the here and now than many of us in Western societies with huge surpluses of resources. I am not claiming that this is unique among the Pirahãs. Nor do I see why such a banal statement should outrage anthropologists or anyone else.

What is unusual, perhaps unique, about the Pirahãs (though, again, nothing at all hinges on them being unique in any of these matters) is the way in which they have codified a principle of immediacy of experience and the way in which it constrains their grammar. My comments are not those of a tourist, such as Otto Jespersen on Hawaiian. They are based on years of trying to figure out what made the Pirahãs different from other Amazonian groups — a difference which everyone who has seen the Pirahãs and other Amazonian groups notices almost immediately.

And I have done field research on 23 other Amazonian groups in addition to the Pirahãs. Based on this cross-cultural research, I have made a proposal. This proposal is not based on the Pirahãs' intelligence, genetics, or any perceived inferiority on their part whatsoever. It is based on what seems to be a cultural taboo on certain ways of speaking. Nothing more.

With regard to their counting system, Pinker has it wrong again. Pirahãs do not have 'one', 'two', and 'many'. That indeed is a common system. Rather, the Pirahãs have no numbers whatsoever and no counting, not even tallying, whatsoever. This claim has been tested in recent work by researchers from MIT's Brain and Cognitive Science Department and a paper is underway to report the results of those tests.

3. Pinker is right that my quarrel is not merely with Chomsky (by now the whole idea of a language instinct or universal grammar is so vacuous and untestable as to hardly warrant a criticism from me or anyone else in any case), but with the field of linguistics more generally. As Sapir warned, it can be very misguided and unscientific to attempt to correlate broad features of culture, e.g. cattle-breeding, with specific linguistic properties, e.g. whether the language mainly has the order Subject Verb Object or not. But there is absolutely nothing similar in that to what I am proposing.

I identify a specific cultural value, needed independently, and unusual syntactic properties, independently recognized, and propose a connection between them that can be tested. Linguistics needs to look harder at such culture-grammar connections. It has been misguided, in my opinion, for not doing so. In a way this is similar to the resurgence of work on language evolution. For some time the speculations on the origins of language were so unscientific and spurious that serious scientists spurned them and said that concern for language evolution was unscientific. In the same way, earlier speculations on culture's influence on language and grammar were so unscientific as to merit strong criticism and the avoidance of this issue altogether. But I am asking that we reconsider this and proceed to a more scientific approach to possible language-culture pairings.

My claim is that there is no such thing as 'just a language' and that the homogenizing efforts of Pinker and others, focusing principally on theories that stretch and chop grammars to fit preconceived notions of what a language should look like do the science of linguistics a serious disservice. Each language in this sense, while sharing cognitive and communicative principles in common with all other languages spoken by Homo sapiens, is unique. This is why it is such a tragedy when a language dies — we don't just lose a grammar. We lose an entire way of thinking and talking about the world; we lose a set of solutions to the problems that beset us all as humans.

The Pirahãs enrich the world through the brilliance and uniqueness of the interaction of their culture and language. Just like all languages and cultures do.

Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Enlightenment Now

I have favorably cited Daniel Everett's work with the Pirahã, both in a scholarly article and in my forthcoming book, and believe that linguists should take his criticisms of the field seriously. But I have become increasingly skeptical of the strong version of his claims, and of the importance that has been attached to his work by the media.

1. Everett claims that Pirahã violates Charles Hockett's famous list of language universals in that it provides no means to discuss events remote from experience. That claim is belied by many of Everett's own observations.

To take just the most obvious example, he writes that "spirits and the spirit world play a very large role in their lives."  Assuming that they don't literally see ghosts and spirits (which would be a discovery far more radical than any of the linguistic or psychological claims at issue) they must have a richly developed, culturally transmitted set of beliefs about entities and events that lie outside the realm of their immediate experience.

Everett's claim that Pirahã lacks the mechanism of recursive embedding (in which a word or phrase can be inserted inside a word or phrase of the same type) must be qualified as well. Pirahã allows for a degree of semantic embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs (so one can express the thought "I said that Kó'oí intends to leave," with two levels of semantic embedding), and one can conjoin propositions within a sentence, as in  "We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish we did not eat." Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues give further examples. It is questionable of Everett to disavow his own data on the grounds that at the time he was in the grip of ideology—his current stance is as polemical and tendentious as anything in Chomskyan linguistics.

2. Whatever grain of truth there may be to the observation that the Pirahã are more concerned with the here-and-now than we are, it is by no means unique to the Pirahã. On the contrary, the observation has been by numerous scholars about numerous foraging and nonstate peoples. For example, in the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace observed of the Indonesian natives he met during his fieldwork:

Compare this (European culture) with the savage languages, which contain no words for abstract conceptions; the utter want of foresight of the savage man beyond his simplest necessities; his inability to combine, or to compare, or to reason on any general subject that does not immediately appeal to his senses. ...

The great linguist Otto Jespersen made similar observations about native Hawaiians, and an anthropologist I know had the same impression (expressed in private) of the !Kung San he worked with in the Kalahari. I suspect that this is simply the default impression that modern Europeans or Americans have of many native peoples, but with the rise of politically correct anthropology in the 20th century, one wasn't allowed to say such things in public directly. In this background, Everett could claim that he was making a discovery about a trait that was unique to the culture he studied, whereas it was only the prior taboo against saying these things about other peoples that made the observation seem novel. By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context. This is not to say that there is no difference in the amount of abstract thinking between foraging and postindustrial societies, just that Everett (and the journalists that have reproduced his claims) are almost certainly wrong in writing that this is unique to the Pirahã, or even unusual among nonliterate peoples.

(The same is true, incidentally, of their counting system. "One, two, many" systems are widespread among foraging peoples, and may be the default counting system among nonliterate peoples.)

3. Everett's truly radical linguistic claim is not about Universal Grammar, and his main opponent is not Chomsky. His radical claim is about variation—the non­-universal aspects of language—and his opponents in this debate are probably 99% of linguists, including most non-Chomskyans.

One of the great findings of linguistics, vastly underappreciated by the rest of the intellectual world (and probably not highlighted enough by linguists themselves) is that the non-universal, learned, variable aspects of language don't fit into any meaningful, purposive narrative about the surrounding culture. Linguists have documented vast amounts of variation, and have a good handle on many of its causes, but the causes are internal to language (such as phonological assimilation and enhancement, semantic drift, and syntactic reanalysis) and aren't part of any symbolic or teleological plan of the culture. There are Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object languages, and tone and non-tone language, and null-subject and non-null-subject languages, but there are no SOV or SVO cultures, null-subject and non-null-subject cultures, and so on. The variation is just as autonomous as the universals. And this is the discovery that Everett is trying to overturn in his claim that the linguistic properties of Pirahã are meaningfully explained by an overarching theme in their culture, namely their alleged unwillingness to think about concepts that lie outside their immediate experience. As I mentioned, numerous observations by Everett himself are inconsistent with this remarkable claim, and Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues show that the connection between his claims about their culture and the details of their language is tenuous at best.

Robert D. Van Valin
Professor of Linguistics at the Uniersity at Buffalo

I'd like to make just a couple of comments with respect to David Pesetsky's reply to my posting. First, the reference to gurus and disciples was taken from Pinker's comments in the New Yorker article; that's why there are double quotation marks around those terms in my comments. The term 'apostate' I added, and it seemed not only to fit with Pinker's remarks, but it also alludes to Everett's past as a missionary and his later rejection of religion. Second, without getting too technical, there are two problems with the alleged counterexample to my claim, namely the 'he [me to-go] doesn't want' example, with reference to which Pesetsky says "it appears to show an embedded clause ("me to-go") preceding the main verb." The first problem is the status of 'me to-go' as a clause. In most theories, but not the one he works in, such things are analyzed not as clauses but as a unit smaller than a clause. Second, and more significantly, there is no evidence, despite their position before the verb, that they are in fact embedded. I have argued for many years that such constructions, even in English, do not involve embedding. So there are good reasons to believe that [me to-go] is neither embedded nor a clause.

I would also like to add that I completely agree with his final comments: "On the other hand, single examples do not decide arguments. One needs to develop carefully investigated paradigms of data (and, ideally, careful examination of texts as well). So there are plenty of investigations to carry out and much thinking to be done before we can settle the matter."

David Pesetsky
Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT

When I expressed my hopes for a "calmer, more reasonable discussion of Pirahã grammar and culture", discussions like Van Valin's talk of disciples, apostates and gurus were definitely not what I had in mind. On the other hand, several of Van Valin's other remarks are important and productive. In these remarks, I would like to highlight and develop just one of them as an example of what calm, reasonable discussion of Pirahã might look like. I will not attempt to address everything.

At several points in our response to Everett's Current Anthropology paper, we suggested that various allegedly unusual properties of Pirahã grammar are actually found in other languages as well -- languages spoken in a variety of cultures. This was important to the argument because if we are in fact dealing with the same grammatical phenomenon in each language, the phenomenon is unlikely to have anything to do with culture. Nonetheless, we took pains to express ourselves cautiously, repeatedly stressing the "if" that I italicized above. It is always possible that two phenomena that look the same on the surface — for example, the position of (alleged) subordinate clauses in German and Pirahã — will turn out to be distinct "under the hood".

This is in effect what Van Valin suggests in the second of the "significant issues" that he raises. He calls attention to the possibility that languages like German differ from Pirahã in that German does not require its (alleged) subordinate clauses to follow the verb, but Pirahã does. If this is true, it might mean that the relevant word order laws of German are not the same as those of Pirahã (i.e. that our claim was wrong) -- or it could merely show that some independent factor intervenes in Pirahã to block the placement of a subordinate clause in one of the positions where German allows it. The second of these possibilities, of course, would require us to identify and understand the independent factor. That would be an important secondary task.

Before we get this far, however, we might start by trying to pin down the facts a bit better. For example, the tendency in German to put a that-clause after the verb is extremely strong -- though indeed not absolute. Is the situation really so different in Pirahã? At present, I think, we do not know. In our paper, we cited a Pirahã example of the form "He [me to-go] doesn't-want". This looks on the face of it like a counterexample to Van Valin's claim, since it appears to show an embedded clause ("me to-go") preceding the main verb. This example might suggest that the two languages are not so different after all. On the other hand, single examples do not decide arguments. One needs to develop carefully investigated paradigms of data (and, ideally, careful examination of texts as well). So there are plenty of investigations to carry out and much thinking to be done before we can settle the matter.

Links:
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion-and-human-thought