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2 unusual facts about Pirahã language


Keren Everett

Keren Everett has spent many years in the Amazon studying the Pirahã tribe and their language.

Steven N. Sheldon

He is known to the linguistics community for his field work and documentation of the Pirahã language.


David Pesetsky

In an article coauthored with Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues, Pesetsky criticized claims by Daniel Everett concerning the Pirahã language, touching off a protracted debate in the pages of the journal Language.

Recursion

The idea that recursion is an essential property of human language (as Chomsky suggests) is challenged by linguist Daniel Everett in his work Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language, in which he hypothesizes that cultural factors made recursion unnecessary in the development of the Pirahã language.


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