Pirahã language: the linguistic anomaly

From:

https://ahtaitay.blogspot.com/2017/12/piraha-language-linguistic-anomaly.html?fbclid=IwAR1KGcHsuAYEcPZkt3HVyv4fSrNvN34xIY8BIgz6nPAFkGr2CHeAXIPlZOs

Linguists, led by Chomsky, were able to describe human languages with astonishing details. From a handful of thoroughly studied human languages, they were able to devise a theory, i.e. Universal Grammar, which could explain all possible human languages with all their hidden features and peculiarities. Every single language fits in there nicely. They were able to account for all the differences that exist among languages and how they are effortlessly learnt by children of 4. We were able to know more about language than ever before. 

Then came along Pirahã, the language that defies all the logic of modern linguistics, and the snake in Chomsky’s grass. Nothing that has been said about how language operates is found in Pirahã. It’s a sort of a linguistic anomaly that constitutes a counterexample to the basic tenets of Universal Grammar. For starters, it is an isolated language, it has no kinship to any other language, it is not in any recognized language family, it has a drastically different structure than other languages and so it’s so difficult to learn, it makes a fat joke about the difficulty of Mandarin. It stands out as one of the strongest evidence for Linguistic Relativity, which states that the mother tongue determines or influences one’s worldview. But how does this pose any problem at all for  the Universal Grammar paradigm? Maybe we should hear what Daniel Everett, the scholar who first discovered and thoroughly studied this language, said about Pirahã. 

Upon gaining a reasonable understanding of Pirahã and its linguistic features, Everett concluded that "universal grammar doesn't seem to work, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for [it]. And what can we put in its place? A complex interplay of factors, of which culture, the values human beings share, plays a major role in structuring the way that we talk and the things that we talk about." If I may paraphrase Everett, there is no such thing as Universal Grammar. The language presents a problem to current linguistic theories of universal grammar because it allegedly lacks all evidence for recursion, an essential property of human language, including embedded clauses and quantifiers. Other peculiarities of Pirahã according to Wikipedia include:

_______________

"Daniel Everett, over the course of more than two dozen papers and one book about the language, has ascribed various surprising features to the language, including:

• One of the smallest phoneme inventories of any known language and a correspondingly high degree of allophonic variation, including two very rare sounds, [ɺ͡ɺ̼] and [t͡ʙ̥]. 

• An extremely limited clause structure, not allowing for nested recursive sentences like "Mary said that John thought that Henry was fired". 

• No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark (though this is disputed in commentaries by Paul Kay and others on Everett (2005)). 

• The entire set of personal pronouns appears to have been borrowed from Nheengatu, aTupi-based lingua franca. Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Pirahã, the close resemblance of the Pirahã pronouns to those of Nheengatu makes this hypothesis plausible. 

• Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. In fact, Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language's prosody. Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm. She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns. 

Everett (2005) claims that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. A single word, baíxi (pronounced [màíʔì]), is used for both mother and father (like English "parent" although Pirahã has no gendered alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.

According to Everett in 1986, Pirahã has words for 'one' (hói) and 'two' (hoí), distinguished only by tone. In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett claimed that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses. In one, ten batteries were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for 'one' and 'two' in this experiment, uniformly using hói for one battery, hoí for two batteries, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two batteries.

The second experiment, however, started with ten batteries on the table, and batteries were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used hói (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six batteries left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three batteries left. Though Frank and his colleagues do not attempt to explain their subjects' difference in behavior in these two experiments, they conclude that the two words under investigation "are much more likely to be relative or comparative terms like 'few' or 'fewer' than absolute terms like 'one' ".

There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns."

______________

This discovery opened new doors in linguistic research. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, argues that "although many aspects of human linguistic competence have indeed evolved biologically, specific grammatical principles and constructions have not. And universals in the grammatical structure of different languages have come from more general processes and constraints of human cognition, communication, and vocal-auditory processing, operating during the conventionalization and transmission of the particular grammatical constructions of particular linguistic communities."

Some linguists argue that some of the properties of Pirahã have been misanalyzed and that others are actually expected under current theories of universal grammar. These include Pesetsky et all. (2009) who sketched a reply in which they dismantle the argumentation that used Pirahã against universal grammar. Find their paper [here]. However, none of them were able to disprove Everett's argument against universal grammar and Pirahã's lack of recursion. 

The Pirahã discovery received huge popularity in the press and made of it an interesting development in the field of linguistics. For instance, check what The Guardian made of this matter [here].  Same goes for the New Scientist [here]. Chicago Tribune commented that Everett "fired a volley straight at the theory when he reported that the Brazilian tribe he was studying didn’t use recursive [sic]." The Times of London characterized Pirahã's lack of recursion as an 'astonishing find'. 

To get a complete idea about Pirahã and how it rebuts Chomsky's Universal Grammar, you may want to read Everett's own book about it. It's a complete volume titled Language: The Cultural Tool. If you want to read the book find it [here].

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“Like... I mean... like er…” The verb 'to like' isn't that complicated, but many of the other uses of the little word are misunderstood and unfairly maligned, says University of Victoria sociolinguist

I asked one question on my profile on Quora and booooom… many answers were proposed to that simple question. After checking some of them out, I came across this article written by Alexandra D’Arcy, who studies the history of like at University of Victoria.

And “using centuries-old texts, personal letters, court documents and even CBC Radio archives from B.C. settlers, she shows that "like" may be increasing in use, but it's not random or a new phenomenon”.

If you think you should read (and listen to) it, I would strongly recommend you to take some minutes in order to read it here (Like, don't blame 'like' on kids these days, says sociolinguist)  

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Linguist who changed the way languages are taught

From: https://www.smh.com.au/national/mak-halliday-university-sydney-chomsky-linguists-20180509-p4zeap.html

Although far too modest to admit it, Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday, who has died at Manly aged 93, extended the work of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx by drawing the study of language and ‘meaning’ further into the natural and social sciences.

Halliday (often known as ‘MAK’) was born in Leeds in Yorkshire on April 13, 1925. It was almost inevitable he would engage with language. Wilfred Halliday, his father, was an English teacher and a poet of the Yorkshire dialect. Winifred Kirkwood, his mother, taught French.

When war broke out, the British government resolved to deploy military forces in Asia and established a national services foreign language training course. Halliday volunteered for the course in 1942 and was posted to the Chinese Intelligence Unit in Calcutta where, among other things, he debriefed those who had fled Japanese-occupied China.

After the war, Halliday obtained a grant from the University of London to study Chinese as an external student at Peking University, where he also taught English. It was at Peking University he began to collect the strands of thought he would later weave into his theories of functional linguistics and grammar.

They included research on Mandarin and Sino-Tibetan languages with the distinguished linguist Luo Changpei and on the languages and dialects of the Pearl River Delta led by Wang Li of Lingnan University at Canton (now Guangzhou). Thus Halliday saw Mao’s Red Army sweep to victory twice. He was in the crowd watching it march into Beijing in February 1949 and, later that year, he saw it triumph in the south.

Halliday returned to England for post-graduate work at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he was influenced by the leading English linguist, John Firth and, later, by the sociologist Basil Bernstein. As Halliday’s China experiences had left him a firm Marxist, the increasing tensions of the Cold War and outbreak of McCarthyism made him ineligible to remain at the SOAS.

Halliday joined the Chinese department at Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1955 under Firth’s supervision. There, Halliday became an active member of the Communist Party and worked alongside luminaries including eminent historians Joseph Needham and Eric Hobsbawm. Halliday broke with the party over the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956.

It was at Cambridge that Halliday applied his insights into language. Drawing on Firth’s work, Halliday came to see language as a social construction and, crucially, the mechanism by which society is reproduced and, occasionally, transformed. That insight, combined with his commitment to improving social conditions, left Halliday searching for a new way of teaching language to improve literacy rates and give ordinary people greater opportunities.

This socially focused approach put Halliday at odds with established figures on the ‘nature’ side of the ‘nature or nurture’ debate. They included Noam Chomsky and his followers, who believed the human capacity for language was innate rather than acquired during life.

Halliday argued the key to language development lay in how children attribute "meaning" to elements in their environment. In contrast to Chomsky and his followers, who advocated an inherent universal human grammar, Halliday developed a theory of language based on a system of choices. The results were Halliday’s models of systemic functional grammar and systemic functional linguistics.

His approach remains a strong influence on the field of descriptive linguistics and on teacher training curriculum across the world today. An unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his theories arose on his resignation from the University of London to take up a post at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

By then Halliday had married Ruqaiya Hasan, one of his early postgraduate students and a formidable linguist. When the Canadian government declined to grant Halliday a visa, he realised their young son, Neil, offered a chance to closely monitor how children develop grammar.

Halliday’s study showed how children build grammar in stages through the specific interactions of their lives. This led to the publication of his seminal work Learning how to Mean in 1975, in which Neil was given the rather unconvincing pseudonym ‘Nigel’. It is indicative of Halliday’s sense of humour that he considered dedicating his book to the Canadian government.

Halliday’s ground-breaking work was recognised by the University of Sydney, which appointed him foundation professor of linguistics in 1976. For the following decades, the family home at Killara and later Manly would be an international meeting house for language studies with both Halliday and Hasan (who was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University) both in great demand for international conferences, visiting professorships, and publications.

Halliday’s retirement in 1987 gave him the chance to pursue a range of pastimes, including bushwalking, train travel and the Herald’s cryptic crossword. He and Hasan divided their time between Manly and Urunga on the NSW north coast, where they listed the native birds of the district.

A steady stream of conference papers and books flowed, culminating in the publication of Halliday’s 11-volume collected works. He retained ties to China, where his theories struck fertile ground, and regularly lectured at the major universities in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai.

Both Halliday and Hasan attended the opening of a Centre for Language Studies based on his work at City University in Hong Kong in 2006. Waiters at Manly yum cha restaurants were often astonished to find an elderly Westerner ordering off the menu in fluent Mandarin.

Halliday’s thick glasses and long sideburns gave him an owlish appearance; features picked up by the cartoonist who drew him (and Chomsky) for Icon Books’ Introduction to Linguistics. A remarkably friendly, approachable man considering his Olympian academic status, Halliday remained optimistic about the future, although his views were tempered by Yorkshire pragmatism.

Concerned that media reports on China often overlooked positive developments there, he nevertheless worried over China attempts to expand its geopolitical influence. “We may have to get used to having less freedom” he observed during our conversations on foreign affairs. Donald Trump’s electoral appeal reminded Halliday of Marx’s comment that the working class often voted against its own interests.

Hasan’s death in 2015 deprived Halliday of his lover and collaborator. He celebrated his 93rd birthday, but a painful outbreak of shingles clouded his last years.

Halliday married several times prior to his relationship with Hasan. His first marriage was to Trenchu Wong at Shanghai in 1947. He later married Irene (‘Pat’) Woolf, with whom he had a son Andrew and daughter Polly. After their divorce, he and the geneticist Anne McLaren had a daughter, Caroline.

Halliday later married Brenda Stephen and they had a daughter, Clare.

Halliday is survived by his children and four grandchildren, Bianca, Nicole, Rhona and Cameron and an extraordinary intellectual legacy with which a third generation of scholars continue to engage and extend.

Justin Cahill

Michael Halliday 1925 - 2018

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Noam Chomsky The theories of the world’s best-known linguist have become rather weird

FEW disciplines are so strongly associated with a single figure: Einstein in physics and Freud in psychology, perhaps. But Noam Chomsky is the man who revolutionised linguistics. Since he wrote “Syntactic Structures” in 1957, Mr Chomsky has argued that human language is fundamentally different from any other kind of communication, that a “linguist from Mars” would agree that all human languages are variations on a single language, and that children’s incredibly quick and successful learning (despite often messy and inattentive parental input) points to an innate language faculty in the brain. These ideas are now widely accepted.

Over the past 60 years, Mr Chomsky has repeatedly stripped down his theory. Some aspects of human language are shared with animals, and others are part of more general human thinking. He has focused ever more narrowly on the features of language that he reckons are unique to humans. All this has led to a remarkable little book, published late last year with Robert Berwick, a computer scientist. “Why Only Us” purports to explain the evolution of human language.

Other biologists, linguists and psychologists have probed the same question and have reached little consensus. But there is even less consensus around the world’s most eminent linguist’s idea: that a single genetic mutation created an ability called “Merge”, in a single human whom Mr Chomsky has called “Prometheus”, some time before the human exodus from Africa. That mutation was so advantageous that it survived and thrived, producing today’s 7,000 languages from Albanian to Zulu. But the vast differences among the world’s languages, Mr Chomsky argues, are mere differences in “externalisation”. The key is Merge.

But what is it? Merge simply says that two mental objects can be merged into a bigger one, and mental operations can be performed on that as if it were a single one. The can be merged with cat to give a noun phrase, which other grammar rules can operate on as if it were a bare noun like water. So can the and hat. Once there, you can further merge, making the cat in the hat. The cat in the hat can be merged with a verb phrase to create a new object, a sentence: The cat in the hat came back. And that sentence can be merged into bigger sentences: You think the cat in the hat came back. And so on.

Why would this be of any use? No one else had Merge. Whom did Prometheus talk to? Nobody, at least not using Merge. (Humans may already have been using cries and gestures, as many animals do.) But Merge-enabled, hierarchically structured language, according to Mr Chomsky, did not evolve for talking at all. Rather, it let Prometheus take simple concepts and combine them in sentence-like ways in his own head. The resulting complex thoughts gave him a survival advantage. If he then passed the mutant Merge gene on to several surviving children, who thrived and passed on the Merge gene to their children, Messrs Chomsky and Berwick believe that they must have then come to dominate the population of humans in Africa. Only later, as Merge came to work with the vocal and hearing organs, did human language emerge.

Many scholars find this to be somewhere between insufficient, improbable and preposterous. The emergence of a single mutation that gives such a big advantage is derided by biologists as a “hopeful monster” theory; most evolution is gradual, operating on many genes, not one. Some ability like Merge may exist, but this does not explain why some words may merge and others don’t, much less why the world’s languages merge so differently. (Not a single non-English example appears in “Why Only Us”, nor a single foreign language in its index.)

Mr Chomsky says those who disagree with his ever-more contentious ideas are either blind or hucksters. Critics refer to a “cult” of “acolytes” around a “Great Leader”, unwilling to challenge him or engage seriously with the work of non-Chomskyan scholars. (One critic has said “to be savaged by Chomsky is a badge of honour.”) Linguistics is now divided into a Chomskyan camp, a large number of critics and many more still for whom the founder of the modern discipline is simply irrelevant. He is unlikely to end up like Freud, a marginal figure in modern psychology whose lasting influence has been on the humanities. Mr Chomsky’s career is more likely to end up like Einstein’s—at least in the sense that his best and most influential work came early on.

From: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21695371-theories-worlds-best-known-linguist-have-become-rather-weird-noam-chomsky?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/noamchomsky   

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What are some classic papers in linguistics that a beginner should read?

Someone has asked this question on Quora and a lad named Marc Ettlinger, PhD, Linguistics, UC Berkeley provided us with this great answer:

Linguistics sits somewhere between sciences like neuroscience, computer science and psychology and humanities, including modern languages and philology.

 I'll highlight a few classic books and articles with the idea that there are many that I'm leaving out. Note that there is a bias here towards older papers that have shown their reliability over time, whereas the most relevant papers to someone doing research now will be generally newer, but less reliable.

Broca (1865) On the site of the faculty of articulated speech. - Pioneering study of neurolinguistics, identifying Broca's area

Paul Broca

·    Saussure (1916). A Course in General Linguistics - Introduced a number of ideas fundamental to the study of modern linguistics including the arbitrariness of the sign and the importance of studying linguistics synchronically

·         Sapir (1921) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Edward Sapir

 ·  Jakobson (1941). Child Language: Aphasia and Linguistic Universals - Jakboson was a giant of structuralism, but this volume is the one that's really lasted the test of time.

·   Wittgenstein (1953). Philosophical Investigations. The seminal work on the philosophy of language, introducing Language-games and key work onCategory theory

·         Whorf (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality - The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

·       Berko (1958) The Child's Learning of English Morphology. - Introduced thewug-test and popularized the idea of studying child language as a way of unlocking the secrets of language

·         Chomsky. (1959) A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior - The critique of behaviorism that launched the cognitive revolution.

·       Labov, W. (1964) The Social Stratification of English in New York City - Launched modern sociolinguistics

·               Chomsky (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - Culmination of 5-10 years of revolutionizing the study of linguistics as a cognitive science

·    Greenberg. (1966) Language Universals - Revealed striking patterns of regularity across languages

·             Lenneberg (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. Introduced the idea of a critical period

·         Chomsky & Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English - Treatise on generative phonology

Chomsky & Halle

·         Geschwind (1970). The Organization of Language and the Brain - Key state-of-the-art on language and the brain

·         Eimas et al., (1971). Speech perception in infants. Pioneering research on child language.

·         Brown (1973). A first language: The early stages. One of the first careful documentations of a child learning language.

·         Ladefoged (1975) A course in phonetics - The textbook on phonetics, to this day

·         Grice (1975) ‘Logic and Conversation’ - Foundational work on pragmatics and diyadic conversation.

·         Lakoff & Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By - One of the touchstones in the emerging Cognitive Linguistics

·         Fodor (1983) The Modularity of Mind - The clearest argument for encapsulation and modularity of the language faculty

·         Werker & Tees (1984) Cross Language Speech Perception - Helped establish the processes involved in the earliest stages of language understanding.

·         Prince & Smolensky (1993) Optimality Theory - Transformed phonology and persists as the dominant paradigm

·         Nunberg, Sag & Wasow (1994) Idioms - A really nice example of a clear, interesting paper that I keep returning to over and over - more of a sentimental favorite on my part, plus Nunberg. Yes, that Geoff Nunberg, before he was famous.

·         Chomsky (1995) The Minimalist Program - The current paradigm for studying syntax

·         Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996) Statistical Learning by 8-month-old Infants - Re-introduced the idea that language acquisition may depend on domain-general mechanisms

·         Luce & Pisoni (1999). Recognizing Spoken Words: The Neighborhood Activation Model. One of the most cited papers in psycholinguistics and speech recognition.

·         Kuhl (2000) A new view of language acquisition

·         Jurafsky & Martin (2000). Touchstone for computational linguistics.

·         Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) The Faculty of Language: What is it, Who Has It and How Did It Evolve - Pushed all the generative linguistics chips onto the notion of recursions. And the response: Pinker & Jackendoff (2004) The faculty of language: what's special about it?

Well, this is not all, but I think that whoever is going to read this post, will be busy for a while. Therefore, enjoy it.