My reply to Givon

[Daniel Everett]

Tom and I have agreed on many things and disagreed on many things. So  
when he told me that he would be posting a note to Funknet about my  
Current Anthropology article, I wasn't sure what to expect.

Now that I have read it, however, I can say that I am in agreement  
with most of it. Before giving my reply, let me give a plug for a  
book to be released next year: Don't sleep, there are jaguars:  
Lessons on life, language, and belief from the Amazon (Pantheon Books  
in the US; Profile Books in the UK; DVA in Germany; Flammarion in  
France; and several other countries). This book discusses in detail  
Piraha culture, my life among them, and the implications of their  
language and culture for our understanding of Homo sapiens. It also  
discusses my journey from Christian missionary to atheist, as a  
result of the Pirahas' empiricism.

Let me begin with a few points of clarification. First of all, I did  
not originally write my article as any kind of response to Hauser,  
Fitch, and Chomsky initial article on the broad vs. narrow faculties  
of language (FLB vs. FLN, respectively), certainly it was not written  
as a response to their idea of recursion. I didn't even know about  
their article at the time. I was busy beginning a new research  
program documenting another Amazonian language. But David Gil of the  
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig had  
organized a conference on numerals in the world's languages and had  
invited me to come and hang around the MPI for a month, which I did  
(the MPI being the closest thing to Disneyland for academics, to use  
Robert Van Valin's description, that I have encountered. I had  
originally called it an academic monastery, but the Disneyland  
metaphor seems better). I wrote the Current Anthropology paper while  
I was at the Max Planck and only after finishing it learned of the  
HFC paper, so I went back and rewrote a couple of sentences. But the  
main reason that I wrote the CA paper was to account for a range of  
phenomena in Piraha, from the simplicity of the kinship system to  
lack of folktales to lack of numerals and lack of recursion in the  
syntax.
I am happy to report that there is a team of people conducting new  
and exciting research on Piraha these days: Amy Perfors, Michael  
Frank, Evelina Fedorenko, and Ted Gibson at MIT's Brain and Cognitive  
Sciences Department, Jeanette Sakel of the University of the West of  
England, Miguel Oliveira at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and  
Eugenie Stapert at the University of Manchester. Frank, Fedorenko,  
Gibson, and I have a new paper tentatively accepted in Cognition on  
the lack of numerals and counting in Piraha. Sakel and Stapert have a  
paper submitted on the absence of recursion in Piraha. And the MIT  
group is continuing to interpret results for a number of experiments  
that we have already carried out on short-term memory, perceptions of  
two-dimensional representation, recursion, and so on. This is very  
good to see, whatever the results.

I don't know why my style in the Current Anthropology piece would  
sound like I am recently converted to or from anything. Although my  
interest in Chomskyan linguistics was pretty much nil at the time  
that I wrote that piece, I hadn't done much in Chomskyan theory or  
formal linguistics, except some phonology, since the mid-90s. I had  
already been doing my own thing, more concerned with trying to think  
through my own evolving ideas on Ethnogrammar – the subject of my job  
talk at the University of Manchester in 2002, from ideas that I had  
been working on for a couple of years before that. So there was no  
recent conversion experience.

             I agree with Tom that it would be a shame if we allowed  
Chomsky or any other framework to regularly establish the bounds of  
our discussions. My own view is that if a linguist is being a good  
little boy or girl and doing fieldwork as they ought to, then plenty  
of ideas will emerge, which they can connect to current or ancient  
theoretical issues as their interests dictate.

             On Tom's view of grammaticalization, going, say, from  
parataxis to adjunction to embedding, so far as I can tell this is a  
very good idea. It was first suggested, I think, by Ken Hale in his  
1976 paper on the lack of embedding in expected places in some  
Australian languages. Interestingly, this order mirrors Tom's even  
earlier ideas on the development of agreement in the process:  
pronouns to clitics to agreement affixes. I found this idea very  
useful in my own book Why there are no clitics, written in the  
generative style (I think a lot of so-called theorizing is little  
more than a style of writing). I am not claiming, or at least I do  
not intend to be claiming, that Piraha is unique in any respects  
other than in terms of documentation. Other languages might/probably  
will be documented that have a similar range of properties.

I am happy to have my views interpreted such that culture constrains  
the grammaticalization process. On the other hand, this is an  
empirical issue and we need lots more data than we have.

As to why culture has this effect in some languages and not others,  
Tom's question reveals a common misunderstanding, no doubt my fault,  
about what I am saying. I am not proposing that the cultural  
principal that constrains the Pirahas' grammar is a universal  
principle. It just is supposed to work for Piraha. I believe that  
every culture-grammar pairing is likely to have its own principles.  
There may be a theory in there, but maybe not. I don't know.