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Worth mentioning this refutation to Daniel Everett's argument by linguist at the University of Toronto published on Medium: https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-

by amasad 10y ago

Worth mentioning this refutation to Daniel Everett's argument by linguist at the University of Toronto published on Medium: https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-believe-the-rumours-universal-grammar-is-alive-and-well-58c1fbc5608b#.9c1iiaudx https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-believe-the-rumours-univ... >Which brings us to the mistaken view of the actual theory of UG that article such as the SA piece present. Daniel Everett, a field linguist and former evangelical missionary, gained prominence in 2005 when he claimed that Pirahã, a language spoken by a remote Amazonian tribe showed properties that categorically refuted the UG hypothesis. Central to UG theory, in Everett’s estimation, is embedding, the ability of a language to place, for example, a clause inside another clause (as in “I heard that Maura laughed”). Pirahã, it seemed, was unable to embed. >On the surface, this does seem like a knockout punch to UG, but there’s just one problem with it: Everett is mistaken about what UG is.

mannykannot 10y ago
The author of that article follows with "The source of [Everett's] confusion seems to be the term recursion, which is the central concept of modern Generative linguistics... Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that expression." This seems to make UG look like trivial feature of language - something like "we find it to be universally true that human languages use statements of more than one word"? I'm not knocking generative linguistics, but I get the impression that this author has done it a disservice in his eagerness to put down Everett.