Daniel Everett, Chomsky, Pinker and the curse of recursion

NON-UK based sci.lang readers may have heard of Daniel Everett. I
didn't know of him until today and that was only courtesy of a feature
in the G2 pullout supplement to the guardian newspaper.

His story reads like something of an inverse Emerald Forest by way of
Dances with Wolves for the film buffs here: he went over to the Amazon
to learn the language of a remote tribe, work out a writing system for
it, translate the christian gospels, and covert the good primitive
people to a life of freedom--from fear, from fear of death, from greed
and avarice and so on but ended up deconverting.

It's perhaps noteworthy that his wife, who is still out there working
amongst them, sported the surname "Graham" though no explicit link is
drawn between her and God's Southern Baptist Hellfire Palin-fan Billy.

What's alarming though is that he studied anthropology and qualified
in linguistics almost as a tag-on to facilitate his missionary work,
yet it seems almost that within the scientific world of the burden of
proof that he may have been up against that wall of "we're not going
to tell you what you need to know--we're just going to insist you're
wrong..." which I kind of get the impression linguistics prides itself
on.

It cannot be doubted that Chomsky and his sometimes controversial
acolyte Steven Pinker, whilst both accessible and controversial in the
work they have done in linguistic theory, are widely misunderstood.

As such, perhaps it is worth keeping in mind that simply because a
language doesn't feature a particular characteristic - in this case a
recursive function - it doesn't mean that such a possibility doesn't
occur to the native-speaking children who grow up learning it.

The example in morphophonolgy cited by Chomsky himself (or was it
Carol in this instance?) is that within the babble of infants learning
English, or Spanish, or French, there are phonemes found in Mandarin,
Japanese or Hawaiian which native speakers of those languages do hear
and acknowledge but to which native speakers of English, Spanish or
French are culturally deaf.

As such, and particularly given he has never lived continuously with
his chosen people, it is possible their children try to use recursive
structures but they are dissuaded as nonsensical by the surrounding
native-speaking adults. Certainly this possibility seems not have been
covered in the interview I read today.

On the other hand there are other possibilities, such as that the
recursive function could be linked to what might think of more as "the
number concept" given these people allegedly have no counting systems
at all.

It's a shame. His autobiography to date is available but it doesn't
sound like it covers too much of the theory or his analytical work. It
also sounds like there haven't been too many linguisticians willing to
actually work with the guy--Chomsky and Pinker were interested enough
to find the points at which they might, if you like, tell him to ***
off, but since then have merely bluntly insisted they are right.

It all smacks a bit of almost a parallel to the realisation that
Hallowe'en can only be an occultist festival in homage to the Devil
and his pandemonic hordes from a post-Christian intellectual framework
- and from quite an entrenched one at that given the intercessory
metaphysics of All Saints Day in the first place - and seen merely as
a metrical festival based on a seasonal calendar that marks the start
of winter can be entered into by parents as genuinely a bit of
anthropo-historical fun as easily as used as a separatist stick with
which to beat one's children.

So, to return to the point, just because a language does not feature a
recursive function in its fluent first-language adult speaking grammar
does not, per se, mean the language function of humans doesn't. But,
then again, if recursive logic should turn out to be part of the
number concept, which is of course very, very closely related to
language but considered distinct, maybe Everett has a point.

But surely the fact that a language appears to have no recursive
function should be of some interest to some of the people in Chomsky's
faculty--he does after all have Doctoral students who should be as
keen to prove anything as our lot were to prove you couldn't get any
more information onto an electron in the context of magnetic storage.
In terms of the advancement of the knowledge of science they
effectively contributed squat; in terms of delivering seminars and
working on papers and keeping the wheels of academe turning they got
their PhDs.

Then again the interview was presented from Everett's perspective. And
one wonders by what grammatical logic the people he lived with
identified him as the guy who intervened to prevent the urban traders
providing whiskey if they have no knowledge of past or future nor any
recursive function at all...

I shall have to try and find his paper and see for myself. Only I'm
not convinced it'll be in the libraries I have membership of and even
if it is I may not, as a member who is not an enrolled student or
faculty member, have access.

So I shall have to be working out how to get the best out of the
British Library's Document Supply Centre. This may take some time.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 SIPSTON
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