From:
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' ".
______________
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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