Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=34102

Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is
why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal
Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of
linguistics, is so unusual.

On one side is Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University,
who has spent several decades studying Pirahã, a language spoken by roughly
350 indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. On the other are a
number of linguists, including MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, who
have thrown doubt upon many of Everett’s claims, both cultural and
linguistic, about the Pirahã.

In a telephone interview, Pesetsky said, "What we tried to do in our
response was to highlight the ways in which we are trying to unravel the
system that unites all the languages in the world," including Pirahã. The
attributes that Everett claims are unique to that language are in fact
extant in other well-documented languages, such as Bengali and even German.

Linguistics began to focus attention on UG several decades ago in an attempt
to move their study from the particularization of philology--the detailed
description of individual languages and language families, with which the
field was preoccupied for centuries--to an understanding of the remarkable
wealth of features that all languages share, and thence to an understanding
of the human mind.

The current contretemps began with Everett’s 2005 paper in Cultural
Anthropology, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã:
Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language," which described a
number of "gaps" in Pirahã morphosyntax (the relationships between words
and how their elements convey meaning).

As a culture, says Everett, Pirahã speakers lack any sense of the past
beyond what living individuals have personally experienced, and they have
no creation myths or fiction, no sense of numbers or counting, and no art.
Constraints of culture, Everett believes, in turn impoverish the language,
which has no tenses, no names for colors and other allegedly unique
paucities.

The language constraints, he claims, indicate "some of the components of
so-called core grammar are subject to cultural constraints, something that
is predicted not to occur" by Chomsky’s universal-grammar model.

Everett’s article and his colorful field career have been taken up by the
popular press, with stories in the Independent, Der Spiegel and, most
recently, the New Yorker, among other publications.

His critics--Pesetsky, Andrew Nevins of Harvard and Cilene Rodrigues of the
Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil--fired back in March of this
year with a paper entitled "Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment," taking
issue with virtually every claim to Pirahã’s uniqueness that Everett
advanced. Everett hastily answered (also in March), with "Cultural
Constraints on Grammar in Pirahã: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and
Rodrigues (2007)." (Those two papers may be viewed at the LingBuzz
linguistics archive site, ling.auf.net/lingbuzz, where they head the "Top
Recent Downloads" list.)

Pesetsky marvels at the interest this debate has sparked, not only within
the field but in the world at large. As of April 12, he noted in an e-mail,
"Our paper has been downloaded 1,300 times and (Everett’s) reply has been
downloaded 910 times--astonishing figures for the site and for a field like
linguistics."

While linguists at MIT pay a lot of attention to theoretical questions, such
as the universal properties of sound systems, speech perception and speech
production, field linguistics is far from moribund here. Linguistics grad
student Seth Cable is heading off soon to Alaska on an National Science
Foundation dissertation grant, to study the syntax and semantics of
questions in Tlingit, a language spoken by an indigenous people of the
Pacific Northwest. And one of the great figures in field linguistics, the
late Kenneth Hale, was an esteemed member of the MIT faculty until his
retirement in 1999; in his long career, he worked on languages as diverse
as Hopi, Tohono O’odham (of the Sonoran desert region) and Warlpiri. His
fluency in the latter, an indigenous language of Australia, was such that
he was able to keep his sons, Ezra and Caleb, fluent in the language even
after they had moved back to the United States. "He was a linguist’s
linguist," as Pesetsky put it