Article

Name: The argument between Daniel Everett and Generativists, or How Irreconcilable Their Views Really Are

Authors: P. S. Dronov

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The article deals with the argument between Daniel Everett, the author of case studies of Pirahã, with generative linguists regarding the universality of certain phenomena in language, such as recursion, as well as cultural constraints that may be imposed on grammar. Also, the paper covers Everett’s views on the subject as well as those of his opponents and contemporary scholars dealing with Pirahã. Moreover, Everett’s position as expressed in his articles and books («Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes»; «Language: The Cultural Tool») is compared to the ideas of ethnolinguistics and the Russian school of language and culture studies in phraseology (formulaic lexicon). The author provides parallels between grammar and lexical semantics of Pirahã and other languages, arguing that there may be little or no fundamental irreconcilability between Everett and generativists: since there is some similarity between various human communities, likeness may be found between their cultures, however different they are. Therefore, certain similarities are to be found in their languages, too. The article is an expanded version of the afterword to the forthcoming Russian translation of Daniel Everett’s «Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes».

Keywords: generative linguistics, daniel everett and pirahã studies, ethnolinguistics, language and culture studies, lexical semantics, phraseology (formulaic lexicon)

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