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Daniel Leonard Everett (born 1951 in Holtville, California1) is a linguistics professor best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language.
He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He previously taught at the University of Manchester and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh.
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Early life
Everett was married at age 18 to Keren Graham, who was the daughter of Christian missionaries. The couple graduated with degrees in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1976. They then enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.), which trains missionaries to quickly learn foreign languages so that they can go into remote areas, learn the language, and then translate the Bible into that language.
Because Everett quickly demonstrated a gift for language, he was invited to study Pirahã, which the S.I.L. faculty had failed to learn in 20 years of study. In 1977, the couple and their three children moved to Brazil, where they studied Portuguese for a year before moving to a Pirahã village at the mouth of the Maici River in the Lowland Amazonia region.2
Education in linguistics
Everett had some initial success learning the language, but when the S.I.L. lost their contract with the Brazilian government, he enrolled in the fall of 1978 at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, under the auspices of which he could continue to study Pirahã. Everett focused on the theories of Noam Chomsky and in his Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1983, he performed a Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã.2
On one of his research missions in 1993, he discovered a new language, the Oro Win language, which is one of the few languages that uses the rare voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (phonetically, [t͡ʙ̥]).
The Chomsky debate
Everett eventually concluded that the Chomsky framework of universal grammar, the fundamental principle of recursion in particular, didn't obtain in Pirahã. His 2005 article in Current Anthropology, titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,"3 has caused a controversy in the field of linguistics.2
Atheism
Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, he slowly lost his Christian faith and became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985 after having spent a year at MIT. He would not tell anyone about his atheism for another 19 years; when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact.4
References
- ^ Curriculum vitae.
- ^ a b c John Colapinto, "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?", The New Yorker, April 16, 2007
- ^ Daniel Everett, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã", Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005, pp. 621-46.
- ^ Middleton, Liz Else, Lucy (2008-01-19). "Interview: Daniel Everett", New Scientist. Retrieved on 25 January 2008.
External links
- Daniel Everett's homepage
- Recursion and human thought: why the Pirahã don't have numbers. A Talk With Daniel L. Everett (Edge.org)
- Article in University of Pittsburgh University Times
- Professor Everett as a child
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 14 November 2008, at 06:52.
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