Researcher X finds world shaking X in language of tribe X

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu Jan 08, 2009 3:38 am

What Chomksy said is rubbish because the Piraha don't use recursion in their language. Read all about it!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/no ... ook-review

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Jan 08, 2009 5:03 pm

You've ruffled Brian Browser's trousers with that scoop, Woody! (I'll tell you what he thinks once he's read the review).

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Thu Jan 08, 2009 7:07 pm

This is a new book, but it's old news. I think Everett first published his research at least one or two years ago. I would be interested to know what responses TGG linguists have made about the Pirahã's language. I think it's noteworthy that they don't have a written script or numbers larger than 10. I believe that literacy increases the use of more complex language structures.

A comment like

It always seemed a little odd that someone with Chomsky's belligerent ability to be wrong about almost everything in politics could be so right in another intellectual field.

tells you right away that you are not going to learn much from this book review.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 12:52 am

Are you suggesting, Ouyang, that Piraha is an inferior language?

It always seems to me the main trouble is that these kinds of researchers have an almost visceral need to overstate the importance of their research, and nobobdy really has the evidence to contradict them.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 3:57 am

At least Everett has been doing some actual honest research (i.e. fieldwork). If anyone has an almost visceral need to overstate the importance of their own work, it's Mr C, and he seems to have made a career out of making it very difficult, so unwelcome is the slightest contradiction, to absolutely prove his theories. But you have to give him top marks for audacity and tenacity, and perhaps his methods really will one day incontrovertibly pay the dividends he imagines, despite those methods' apparent limitations to some (Mr C would argue however that he has of necessity widened the scope of things and is thus better addressing the "real" questions etc etc). I for one am waiting with baited breath, enjoying as I am (like countless other teachers and language-specific language professionals) the many fruits of especially UG research on linguistic universals.

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:03 am

Are you suggesting complexity is always superior to simplicity?

I think their language probably reflects their shared experience in certain respects. If there is a grammar gene, then it implies that genetics would explain the difference in Piraha, but I doubt that it would.

I think that comparative grammatical analysis using color-coded text would be useful for this kind of reasearch. I think that it would complement a behavioral approach to studying this language.

I don't think one can overstate the value of color-coded grammar!

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:20 am

On the contrary, you seem to have just done a very good job of taking the colours thing much too far! Why would top-notch linguists need it?

I agree that complexity isn't superiority, but I think that the fact that tribal languages are not supposed to be simple is why people do say they are not inferior. What would make them inferior?

As to Chomsky, sure, but to be fair he has been assailed by many of these doubtful arrows against which there is little scope for defence. In fact you can't in general make any kind of statement about human nature without some Everett type person popping up to tell you it isn't so. It's important to note these people, but it is also limiting and frustrating.

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:17 pm

woodcutter wrote:On the contrary, you seem to have just done a very good job of taking the colours thing much too far! Why would top-notch linguists need it?

Because they wouldn't be "top-notch" if other linguists using a superior visualization system could communicate grammatical relationships more accurately. Like tree diagrams, color-coded grammar is a visualization system, but it communicates more information about grammatical relationships, and it does so in whatever mood a sentence is constructed.

IMO, if Everett believes his written Piraha shows some unique grammatical characteristics, color-coding it alongside English translations would be the most effective way to illustrate them.

Why do historians need maps and musicians need sheet music? Some great musicians never read sheet music, but it doesn't mean someone else can't benefit from seeing music transcribed.

I don't think that classifications of "inferior" and "superior" are helpful for understanding how Piraha is different from other languages. Chomsky's assertion that recursion is a mathematical aspect of language seems to me to fit well with the fact that the Piraha lack some basic mathematical skills.

(the Piraha) seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as "something from Mars."

http://www.jcrows.com/withoutnumbers.html
Anyway, I think Everett's discovery vindicates behavioral linguists like Benjamin Whorf more than it discredits Chomsky.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:41 pm

Yes, inferior basically cannot be said, so the sentence "no language is inferior" has no meaning.

Much as "Culture X has a wonderful X" is annoying in that no culture can be admitted to have a dreadful X (save for western culture).

Why do you think the colour coding is better than a tree for those who know what they are doing? Doesn't a tree represent hierarchy better? (How about a coloured tree?)

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 12:36 am

I usually pack away the nice decorations after Christmas. (Do yours show Rudolph?).

Getting back to the book review itself, my fave comment has to be the 'But the fact is that Chomsky saved linguistics from a behavioural ghetto' (which immediately follows the bit that Ouyang singled out). Wonder what the UG camp looks like nowadays to those in the surrounding sleek high-rise empiricist towers. Probably quite ratty (in more than the one sense) still! The basic tenets of structuralism are still around and seem as valid as ever.

For those who might not have yet seen it, this is probably still the best discussion/set of links on Everett and Piraha to have so far appeared here on the AL forum (no offence, woody!):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=8161

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 3:32 pm

woodcutter wrote:Why do you think the colour coding is better than a tree for those who know what they are doing? Doesn't a tree represent hierarchy better? (How about a coloured tree?)

Hierarchy is just one aspect of sentence structure. Tree diagrams rely on phrase labels because different sentence structures can have the same hierarchy. The following two sentences would have the same tree diagram with different labels.

We ate early.
We ate breakfast.

The next two sentences would have the same tree diagram and the same phrase labels.

They ate breakfast.
They are students.

You could modify the labels to indicate the difference, but there's no real point in doing that because, other than showing how phrases can alternately combine with different immediate constituents, tree diagrams aren't particularly useful for comparing sentence structures. They are used to explain the hierarchical nature of all sentence structures.

In printed publications, they're typically limited to simple sentences because of the space they require, and they can't illustrate the structures of questions. They are not useful in foreign language classes or for comparing the grammar of two languages because of these limitations, and I don't think that color-coding tree diagrams would change that.

I'm not an expert on tree diagrams, linguistics, or Chomsky. I'm just sharing my opinion. Chomsky may be somewhat "belligerent" in defending his language model, but as for his political views he seems relatively congenial by current standards, e.g. Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, etc.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 5:21 am

Aren't the colours doing the same job as labels, more colourfully? Why do you think tree diagrams can't show the structure of questions? You seem to have drifted into classroom/publication thoughts, but that isn't the point here. (regarding the Chomsky and politics comment, I guess politics isn't your thing!)

As to the Piraha etc, The New Yorker article is much better the Guardian article anyway. Everett is alleged to have the party trick of hearing a brief burst of language and then being able to tell you the ins and outs of the grammar. If so he is a pretty good linguist for an anthropologist! It beats Noam's journalist pleasing trick of listing the war-crimes of all US presidents off the top of his head. Still, I've heard Noam criticized for having "no training" in politics. You've got to have the right label on you to comment about anything.

How did I know without reading the other thread that there would anyway be counter articles claiming that tribe X does have all the necessary grammatical features? Anyway, I agree that tribe X as painted by Everett are relevant to more important theories than Chomsky's tatty old things.