Discussion Details
| Title: | Discussion on Piraha |
| Submitter: | Daniel Everett |
| Description: | Ian Goddard's posting on Piraha generics does show that the Immediacy of
Experience Principle that I proposed in Everett (2005) did not carefully distinguish between generics and universal quantification, which even in a 25,000 page article, I didn't have time to do. Generics are something that all languages need. Human evolution has equipped us to discuss events and entities, perhaps the most salient facts about our environment that we must distinguish to survive. Communication requires them and so does evolution. So we do not expect any culture to get by without them. But Universal Quantification, on the other hand, is not required and imposes the idea of exceptionless abstraction beyond experience, far stronger than generics. So it is missing. The Pirahas, like many other societies, constrain their discourse in various ways, including the IEP. Evolution and the nature of communication impose other constraints. Sorting out the different cultural, communicational (in this general sense), and biological constraints on language (for which there is little if any evidence that the biology includes specifically linguistic constraints) is part of a research program that needs to be developed further. A number of items related to these issues will be discussed in a special issue of The Linguistic Review, still in planning, dedicated to recursion in human language. Dan Everett |
| Date Posted: | 07-May-2007 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Anthropological Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 18.1379 |
| Posted: | 07-May-2007 |
