News (Languages) How to Understand the Deep Structures of Language

[Bestiola]

In an alternative to Chomsky’s "Universal Grammar," scientists explore language’s fundamental design constraints.

Starting with pioneering work by Joseph Greenberg, scholars have cataloged over two thousand linguistic universals (facts true of all languages) and biases (facts true of most languages).

Since we became aware of just how tightly constrained the variation in human language is, researchers have struggled to find an explanation. Perhaps the most famous account is Chomsky's Universal Grammar hypothesis, which argues that humans are born with innate knowledge about many of the features of language (e.g., languages distinguish subjects and objects), which would not only explain cross-linguistic universals but also perhaps how language learning gets off the ground in the first place.

Over the years, Universal Grammar has become increasingly controversial for a number of reasons, one of which is the arbitrariness of the theory: The theory merely replaces the question of why we have the languages we have, and not others, with the question of why we have the Universal Grammar we have, and not another one.

As an alternative, a number of researchers have explored the possibility that some universals in language fall out of necessary design constraints.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-understand-the-deep-structures-of-language

 

[Bestiola]

There is one tribe in Amazonia whose language directly opposes Chomsky's idea about the universal grammar - namely their language lacks numbers (they can count only to three) and hence they lack any numerical ability other than the most basic one. They also tend to think solely in parataxis.

The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.” For months, it was the subject of passionate debate on social-science blogs and Listservs. Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Pirahã is a “severe counterexample” to the theory of universal grammar but also that it is not an isolated case.

Everett had to bridge many such cultural gaps in order to gain more than a superficial grasp of the language. “I went into the jungle, helped them make fields, went fishing with them,” he said. “You cannot become one of them, but you’ve got to do as much as you can to feel and absorb the language.” The tribe, he maintains, has no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations, and no original creation myths. Marco Antonio Gonçalves, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, spent eighteen months with the Pirahã in the nineteen-eighties and wrote a dissertation on the tribe’s beliefs. Gonçalves, who spoke limited Pirahã, agrees that the tribe has no creation myths but argues that few Amazonian tribes do. When pressed about what existed before the Pirahã and the forest, Everett says, the tribespeople invariably answer, “It has always been this way.”
Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. “So if you show them a red cup, they’re likely to say, ‘This looks like blood,’ ” Everett said. “Or they could say, ‘This is like vrvcum’—a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.”

Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Chomskyans at universities around the world engaged in formal analyses of language, breaking sentences down into ever more complex tree diagrams that showed branching noun, verb, and prepositional phrases, and also “X-bars,” “transformations,” “movements,” and “deep structures”—Chomsky’s terms for some of the elements that constitute the organizing principles of all language. “I’d been doing linguistics at a fairly low level of rigor,” Everett said. “As soon as you started reading Chomsky’s stuff, and the people most closely associated with Chomsky, you realized this is a totally different level—this is actually something that looks like science. ” Everett conceived his Ph.D. dissertation at UNICAMP as a strict Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã. Dividing his time between São Paulo and the Pirahã village, where he collected data, Everett completed his thesis in 1983. Written in Portuguese and later published as a book in Brazil, “The Pirahã Language and the Theory of Syntax” was a highly technical discussion replete with Chomskyan tree diagrams. However, Everett says that he was aware that Pirahã contained many linguistic anomalies that he could not fit into Chomsky’s paradigm. “I knew I was leaving out a lot of stuff,” Everett told me. “But these gaps were unexplainable to me.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto

The funny thing is that Everett came as a Christian missionary but he was the one who ended up being converted by the Pirahã tribe

 

[Aurifex]

This is fascinating. I'd heard about it some time ago, but not in anything like the same detail. It's nice to see things that don't fit with neat academic theories. If the Chomskyans have learned one piece of wisdom from contact with the Pirahã it's probably this (quoted in Everett's Recursion and Human Thought, Why The Pirahã Don't Have Numbers):
"They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made."

 

[Bestiola]

Very glad you find it interesting I got fascinated by the whole story as well - especially their odd language and consistent opposition to anything from the west, including the Bible stories. Also the manner in which their language shape their mind and makes them incapable of counting. Sapir and Worf would probably love to hear about them Buddha as well - people living completely in the moment, with no thought of the past or the future. Must be incredible to have their mindset.

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.