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The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia: >Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's

by fiblye 6y ago

The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia: >Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences. Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is. I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed grammatical complexity alongside their society? Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it might be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.

WaxProlix 6y ago
Everett is an extremely controversial figure within linguistics, to put it very mildly. Recursive embedding is one of the foundational marks of human language (though not the only), and finding a natural language without it would cast long shadows across the existing literature while making that language's "discoverer" very famous. His data have been challenged by a number of other linguists, despite Everett's attempts to keep others from access to first hand sources. Note too that the existence of alternate constructions such as "John has a brother. This brother has a house." do not preclude the language's ability to accommodate embedding. Anyway, I'm no orthodox Chomskyist (in part because I'm not well enough educated to be:) but I think all of Everett's claims should be taken with as many grains of salt as we can find in our immediate vicinity.
- derriz 6y ago
  Traces of recursion have been found in animal "language" also - https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_human_humans_recursion/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_h... describes recursive elements to certain bird song. More recently here's a recent experiment - https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguistic-feature-not-unique-to-humans/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguist... - which seems to show that some primates have similar "recursive" reasoning skills as young (under 4) children.
  - foldr 6y ago
    The studies on song birds have for the most part been very poorly conceived and based on a simple misunderstanding. (The fact that a grammar can be defined using recursive rules doesn't entail that its string language can't be recognized by non-recursive procedures.) For example, the common A^nB^n string language (which can be defined using a recursive CFG) can obviously also be recognized by counting.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      But the a^nb^n language is context free so there is no regular grammar that can represent it. If a couting mechanism can be used to represent a^nb^n the result will still have to be a context-free grammar, otherwise a^nb^n would not be context-free.
      - foldr 6y ago
        No, that's exactly the mistake. You can check that the counts are equal without parsing the string at all. So the ability to recognize the string language is not evidence that the string is being parsed according to a particular CFG (or any other grammar). In other words, it is not evidence that the birds are pairing up each A with the corresponding B. Most of the literature on birds stems from a confusion of the distinction between regular string languages and context free string languages with the distinction between grammars with and without recursive rules. The two distinctions are largely orthogonal. It is certainly possible, for example, to define certain regular string languages using recursive grammars, and to define certain context free string languages without using recursive grammars. When you say that "the result must be a context free grammar" I think what you mean to say is that the string language defined must be a context free (and non-regular) string language. But that does not in any way entail that the only way to recognize the string language is by means of a particular context free grammar.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        6y ago
- jfengel 6y ago
  I've never understood why it was supposed to be so earth-shaking. Even if true, there's no reason that you have to use embedding. And human beings don't really parse via stacks: we can't parse many deeply center-embedded sentences and other garden path sentences even if they're "valid" under some context-free grammar. That CFGs model so many languages so well is fascinating and puts constraints on the language faculty, but if some language happens to not use the full power of it, that shouldn't come as quite such a surprise. Semantics are not context-free and we know that the underlying brain mechanism is far more complicated than finite-state-machine-plus-stack. A full study of Piraha would likely be illuminating if it really is as different from other languages as Everett says -- and it's practically useless to have him say only "It doesn't have feature X". Unless he can also show that a Piraha child can't learn another language -- that would really mean something. The fact that linguists make a controversy out of it means I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what.
  - WaxProlix 6y ago
    My understanding is that Everett has done his best to make a controversy of it, with most linguists preferring to try to ignore him. Unfortunately that's hard when he's doing the Pinker jig, engaging in pop linguistics, etc. So people are forced to engage with it. I generally agree; finding a language which opts not to use recursion would be a weird phenomenon, and might make certain claims about UG weaker. But it wouldn't invalidate all of traditional linguistic research for the past however many years or totally upend our current theoretical frameworks.
realradicalwash 6y ago
I am hesitant to take the lack of the ability to embed as a fact. My impression is that Everett had a theory in mind when he surveyed Piraha and that he sought to confirm his theory. That is, I am worried that this account is subverted by "theory selects data". So I think what we need is a lot more data, ideally collected by someone who the field views as (relatively) neutral.
- kortex 6y ago
  This is a very valid concern. Pirahã is super isolated, culturally, linguistically, physically. There are a few hundred speakers deep in the Amazon. Everett is _the_ world expert on Pirahã language (second is likely Steven Sheldon), pretty much everything on the subject is viewed through his lens. As I understand it, it was only the past decade or so when others have really started publishing on the subject in ernest. And even Everett didn't catch the bilabial trill affricate till 2004, like 20+ years in to his research.

by fiblye 6y ago

WaxProlix 6y ago

Everett is an extremely controversial figure within linguistics, to put it very mildly. Recursive embedding is one of the foundational marks of human language (though not the only), and finding a natural language without it would cast long shadows across the existing literature while making that language's "discoverer" very famous. His data have been challenged by a number of other linguists, despite Everett's attempts to keep others from access to first hand sources. Note too that the existence of alternate constructions such as "John has a brother. This brother has a house." do not preclude the language's ability to accommodate embedding. Anyway, I'm no orthodox Chomskyist (in part because I'm not well enough educated to be:) but I think all of Everett's claims should be taken with as many grains of salt as we can find in our immediate vicinity.

derriz 6y ago
Traces of recursion have been found in animal "language" also - https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_human_humans_recursion/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/the_less_h... describes recursive elements to certain bird song. More recently here's a recent experiment - https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguistic-feature-not-unique-to-humans/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/complex-linguist... - which seems to show that some primates have similar "recursive" reasoning skills as young (under 4) children.
- foldr 6y ago
  The studies on song birds have for the most part been very poorly conceived and based on a simple misunderstanding. (The fact that a grammar can be defined using recursive rules doesn't entail that its string language can't be recognized by non-recursive procedures.) For example, the common A^nB^n string language (which can be defined using a recursive CFG) can obviously also be recognized by counting.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    But the a^nb^n language is context free so there is no regular grammar that can represent it. If a couting mechanism can be used to represent a^nb^n the result will still have to be a context-free grammar, otherwise a^nb^n would not be context-free.
    - foldr 6y ago
      No, that's exactly the mistake. You can check that the counts are equal without parsing the string at all. So the ability to recognize the string language is not evidence that the string is being parsed according to a particular CFG (or any other grammar). In other words, it is not evidence that the birds are pairing up each A with the corresponding B. Most of the literature on birds stems from a confusion of the distinction between regular string languages and context free string languages with the distinction between grammars with and without recursive rules. The two distinctions are largely orthogonal. It is certainly possible, for example, to define certain regular string languages using recursive grammars, and to define certain context free string languages without using recursive grammars. When you say that "the result must be a context free grammar" I think what you mean to say is that the string language defined must be a context free (and non-regular) string language. But that does not in any way entail that the only way to recognize the string language is by means of a particular context free grammar.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 6y ago
jfengel 6y ago
I've never understood why it was supposed to be so earth-shaking. Even if true, there's no reason that you have to use embedding. And human beings don't really parse via stacks: we can't parse many deeply center-embedded sentences and other garden path sentences even if they're "valid" under some context-free grammar. That CFGs model so many languages so well is fascinating and puts constraints on the language faculty, but if some language happens to not use the full power of it, that shouldn't come as quite such a surprise. Semantics are not context-free and we know that the underlying brain mechanism is far more complicated than finite-state-machine-plus-stack. A full study of Piraha would likely be illuminating if it really is as different from other languages as Everett says -- and it's practically useless to have him say only "It doesn't have feature X". Unless he can also show that a Piraha child can't learn another language -- that would really mean something. The fact that linguists make a controversy out of it means I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  My understanding is that Everett has done his best to make a controversy of it, with most linguists preferring to try to ignore him. Unfortunately that's hard when he's doing the Pinker jig, engaging in pop linguistics, etc. So people are forced to engage with it. I generally agree; finding a language which opts not to use recursion would be a weird phenomenon, and might make certain claims about UG weaker. But it wouldn't invalidate all of traditional linguistic research for the past however many years or totally upend our current theoretical frameworks.

realradicalwash 6y ago

I am hesitant to take the lack of the ability to embed as a fact. My impression is that Everett had a theory in mind when he surveyed Piraha and that he sought to confirm his theory. That is, I am worried that this account is subverted by "theory selects data". So I think what we need is a lot more data, ideally collected by someone who the field views as (relatively) neutral.

kortex 6y ago
This is a very valid concern. Pirahã is super isolated, culturally, linguistically, physically. There are a few hundred speakers deep in the Amazon. Everett is _the_ world expert on Pirahã language (second is likely Steven Sheldon), pretty much everything on the subject is viewed through his lens. As I understand it, it was only the past decade or so when others have really started publishing on the subject in ernest. And even Everett didn't catch the bilabial trill affricate till 2004, like 20+ years in to his research.