Innate Language facility upended

Or that's what American linguist Dan Everett is posing. He has spent a few decades living with and researching Piraha, a group of people indigenous to the Amazon rain forests. He first went down as a missionary, trying to convert the people by translating the bible into their native tongue. The people however, were unmoved by the christian narratives of the bible because their linguistic constructs didn't attach significance to events like the burning bush. Anyways, Dan eventually lost his religion, as well as the belief that there is an innate language facility that exists in all humans. This idea is so dominant because Noam Chomsky, in the mid 1950s, revolutionized linguistics with his research showing that all human languages have a recursive facility and are essentially the same. Dan Everett says that the Piraha people don't have that facility in their language, thus do not fit the Chomskian model of linguistics. Recursion, he says is just a cognitive ability that humans use in their language, but not an innate part of the human condition.

If he's right, this could be the next major revolution in linguistics (and thus, philosophy, computer science, etc). Here's the article (The Interpreter).

Posted by Timothy Washington on 2007.06.25| Original post

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