Education

Academic spat-watch 1: the war on Universal Grammar

June 01, 2007
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It seems that Philip Oltermann's recent report for Prospect on a debate currently rocking the world of linguistics only hinted at how few toys are left in several academic prams.

On one side, we have the American anthropologist Daniel Everett, who after decades of working with an Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã published in 2005 a study claiming that their language defied Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar. On the other hand, we have three distinguished Chomskyites—Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues—leaping to their guru's defence. And it's all getting rather messy. First, there came the trio's 2007 response to Everett, which delicately suggested in its conclusion that:

Almost all the various grammatical properties discussed by Everett appear to be attested in other languages, and stand in no detectable law-governed relation to culture. In addition, as we conducted this investigation, we also repeatedly encountered respects in which Everett's description of the facts are were at unacknowledged odds with previous research, both grammatical and cultural… we consider it particularly unfortunate that so much attention has been diverted… to the non-challenge launched by Everett.
Then came Everett's somewhat less delicate response to this response. Its criticisms, he concluded, embodied:
…the utterly predictable, wearying, and rhetorically fudging tactic that is typical of Chomsky and his followers that there just is no alternative to his proposals.
He continued:
One can only wonder why, if NPR [Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues] are so interested in Pirahã, they have made no effort to do field research there of their own. Rather, they have limited their efforts to bibliographic research… This raises the question of how any discipline could produce the kind of eyeballing, armchair linguistics that NPR engage in… NPR fails to propose experiments or research to test my claims, but merely uses the library. This can only lead to the kind of pseudo-research that we see in this paper. On the other hand, this does not explain the more egregious attacks on my character at the end of NPR. I am only going to say about this that NPR has made an enormous effort to discredit my linguistics research and, for some reason, to also insinuate – again from contrived and decontextualized examples, that I have a prejudiced view of the Pirahãs. This is a sociological problem that I take up in greater detail in Everett (in preparation b).
Well, quite. We wait with bated breath for the great man—not normally short of an opinion or two—to settle the matter himself.