He argues that language is not the product of a “language organ” but an extension of general intelligence.
Instead of unfolding in the same way in Paris and Papua New Guinea, languages are crafted by their speakers to meet their needs. He cites the Pirahii, the Brazilian Amazonian group he has spent the longest time living with. There are no numbers beyond two in Pirahii because, Mr. Everett argues, they have no money, engage in little barter trade, do not store food for the future and do not think about the distant past. This “living for the moment”, which the Pirahii enjoy (they think Western life sounds dreadful), shapes their language.
That different cultures have different words is unsurprising. It is when these differences affect cognition (the Pirahii cannot do maths, for example) that things get interesting. But Mr. Everett?s most controversial argument, and his biggest challenge to linguistic innatism, is about grammar.
Mr. Chomsky has argued that “recursion” is the key feature of all human language. This is the embedding of smaller units inside bigger ones: a subordinate clause is a kind of recursion, embedding a sentence in a bigger one. Mr. Everett says that the Pirahii lack grammatical recursion, and that even if recursion is universal (Piraha use it in stories if not within sentences), this does not prove the existence of the language organ. Information is naturally organized with smaller bits nesting inside larger ones. That nearly all humans would find this linguistically useful is little different than widely varying societies independently inventing the bow and arrow— it is simply useful, and no proof of an instinct. True instincts, like turtles making their way to the sea or ducklings bonding with their mothers, require no learning. Language does. Animals do not truly excel in their deployment of basic instincts, whereas some humans clearly use language much better than others.
But Mr. Everett, in trying to reach a popular audience while making an argument aimed at professional linguists, makes some awkward compromises. He cites a paper by other researchers claiming to have found that there are no features that are common to all languages, an argument that is crucial to his thesis. But he does not give enough detail for the reader. Later he even contradicts himself, saying that all languages have nouns and verbs.
He argues that differences between societies lead to profound differences between languages, but fails to drive the point home fully. The Wari people use the word “hole” or “vagina” as the ordinary word for “wife”. Could this be denigrating of women? Or, since the birth canal is the point of departure for human life, could it be a way of praising them? Mr. Everett is not sure. Or take Banawa, another Amazonian language, in which the default gender of an unknown person or mixed group of people is feminine, not masculine as in most languages. The Banawa also practice rigid gender segregation, even whipping young girls bloody after their first menstruation. Could the unusual gender-assignment of Babawa be a product of this gender-segregated Banawa society? “The only answer at present is, ?Perhaps?,” he writes. Even the lack of grammatical recursion in Piraha, Mr. Everett?s key piece of evidence that it is culture that creates language, cannot tell the whole tale. Similar tribal cultures have languages bristling with recursion.
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Mr. Everett thinks it possible that culture influences grammar, but he is not sure. He acknowledges that conjecture about what causes linguistic differences has been a staple of much irresponsible amateur linguistics. It is hard to work out where culture has affected language, where language affects culture and cognition (a hot topic of psycholinguistic research), and where the differences are unrelated. Mr. Everett has taken a shot across the innatists? bow, and an impressively modest and reasoned one given that Mr. Chomsky once called him a charlatan. His case is not wholly proven, but it deserves a serious reading, and a response beyond name-calling.
16. According to the passage, what are the major differences between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett regarding language?
17. What conclusion does Daniel Everett draw from the fact that the Pirahii do not have numbers beyond two?
18. How do Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett explain respectively the phenomenon that information is organized with small units inside larger ones?
19. What is the weakness of Daniel Everett?s argument in his new book, according to the author of the passage?
20. What is the author?s attitude towards the debates between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky?
III. Writing (30 points, 60 minutes)
The following is an excerpt quoted from a newspaper. Write a composition of about 400 words about the phenomenon indicated and your opinion about it.
Fewer and fewer native Chinese learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Instead, they write their language with a computer, the same way most westerners do. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters: type in wo and Chinese language-support software will offer a menu of characters pronounced wo; the user selects the one desired. With less and less need to recall the character cold, they are forgetting them.
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