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Daniel Everett

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For the pilot, see Daniel Everett (RAF officer).
Daniel Everett
File:Daniel Everett.jpg
BornJuly 26, 1951
Holtville, California, United States
AwardsMany National Science Foundation grants; FIPA; Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Campinas
InfluencesNoam Chomsky, Edward Sapir, Kenneth L. Pike, Franz Boas, William James, John Searle, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris
Academic work
Main interestsLinguistics, anthropology, tacit cognition
Notable worksDon't Sleep, There are Snakes; Language: The Cultural Tool; Grammar of the Wari' Language; Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide (with Jeanette Sakel)
Notable ideasGrammars can be shaped by cultures; there are finite grammars in nonfinite languages [clarification needed]
InfluencedIris Berent, Ted Gibson, Caleb Everett

Daniel Leonard Everett (born 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language.

As of July 1, 2010 he serves as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He is married to Linda Ann Everett.

In 2016 Tom Wolfe published a book, The Kingdom of Speech, in which he discusses work of four major figures in the history of the sciences of evolution and language, the last of them being Daniel Everett.[1] Everett is also currently working on two books: Dark Matter of the Mind: the Culturally Articulated Unconscious, for University of Chicago Press and due in 2016, and How Language Began, under contract with Liveright Publishers, to appear in 2017.

Early life

Everett was raised near the Mexican border. His father was an occasional cowboy, mechanic, and construction worker. His mother was a waitress at a local restaurant in Holtville. Everett played in rock bands from the time he was 11 years old until converting to Christianity at age 17, after meeting missionaries Al and Sue Graham in San Diego, California.

At age 18 Everett married the daughter of these missionaries, Keren. He completed a diploma in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1975. Daniel and Keren Everett subsequently enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), which trains missionaries in field linguistics so that they can translate the Bible into various world languages.

Because Everett, by his own account, quickly demonstrated a gift for language, he was invited to study Pirahã, which previous SIL missionaries had, according to Everett, failed to learn in 20 years of study. In 1977, after four months of jungle training and three semesters of courses in linguistic analysis, translation principles, and literacy development, 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] Since 1999, Everett's stays in the jungle have notoriously included a generator powered freezer (which according to Everett is well stocked with ice cream), and a large video and DVD collection. Says Everett, “After twenty years of living like a Pirahã, I’d had it with roughing it.”[2]

His first marriage to Keren Graham lasted 35 years and they had three children: Caleb Everett (associate professor of anthropology, University of Miami); Kristene Diggins (DrNP [clarification needed] in Charlotte, North Carolina); and Shannon Russell (a missionary with Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS), along with her husband).

Education in linguistics

Everett had some initial success learning the language, but when SIL lost their contract with the Brazilian government, he enrolled in the fall of 1978 at the University of Campinas in Brazil, under the auspices of which he could continue to study Pirahã. Everett focused on the theories of Noam Chomsky. His master's thesis, Aspectos da Fonologia do Pirahã, was written under the direction of Dr. Aryon Rodrigues, one of the leading experts on Amazonian languages. It was completed in 1980. His Ph.D. dissertation, A Lingua Pirahã e Teoria da Sintaxe, completed in 1983, was written under the direction of Dr. Charlotte Chamberlland Galves. This dissertation provided a detailed Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã.[2]

On one of his research missions in 1993, he documented the previously undocumented Oro Win language, one of the few languages [clarification needed] that use the rare voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (phonetically, [t̪͡ʙ̥]).

Work

Universal grammar

Everett eventually concluded that Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar, and the universality of recursion in particular, are falsified by 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][4] Though a supporter of Everett in the early part of Everett's career, Chomsky refuses to further discuss Everett's works and has called him a charlatan.[5] The June 2009 issue of the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language, contains a nearly 100-page debate between Everett and some of his principal critics.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

In November 2008, Everett's book on the culture and language of the Pirahã people, and what it was like to live among them, was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books and in the United States by Pantheon Books. Blackwell's booksellers in the UK selected this as one of the best books of 2009 in the UK. National Public Radio selected it as one of the best books of 2009 in the US. Translations have appeared in German, French, and Korean, and others are due to appear in 2010 in Thai, and Mandarin. Although the book has been discussed widely on the internet for the chapter that discusses his abandonment of religious faith, it is mainly about doing scientific field research and the discoveries that this has led to about the grammar and culture of the Pirahã people. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was runner-up for the 2008 award for adult non-fiction from the Society of Midland Authors.[6]

Language: The Cultural Tool

This book develops an alternative to the view that language is innate. It argues that language is, like the bow and arrow, a tool to solve a common human problem, the need to communicate efficiently and effectively.[7][8]

Religious beliefs

Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, Everett's belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late '90s;[9] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[10]

Selected publications

Books

  • Linguistic Fieldwork (2012). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Daniel Everett & Jeanette Sakel.
  • Don't sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle (2008). Pantheon Books, New York.
  • Language: The Cultural Tool (2012). Pantheon Books, New York.
  • Wari: the Pacaas Novos language of western Brazil (1997). Routledge, London, New York.
  • Why there are no clitics: an alternative perspective on pronomial allomorphy (1996). SIL, Dallas, Texas.

See also

References

  1. ^ An article, The Origins of Speech, was published in Harper's Magazine, presenting in advance the content of this book.
  2. ^ a b c d Colapinto, John (April 16, 2007). "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 30, 2014.
  3. ^ Daniel Everett, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã", Current Anthropology, volume 46, number 4, August–October 2005, pp. 621-46.
  4. ^ Robin H. Ray, "Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar", MIT News, April 23, 2007.
  5. ^ Folha de S.Paulo [clarification needed], 1 February 2009.
  6. ^ Mary Claire Hersh. "Society of Midland Authors Prior Award Winners". www.midlandauthors.com. Retrieved 2015-09-19.
  7. ^ "Dan Everett - Linguist, Author, Philosopher, and Musician". Dan Everett Books. 2015-02-26. Retrieved 2015-09-19.
  8. ^ Bartlett, Tom (March 20, 2012). "Angry Words". Chronicle of Higher Education.
  9. ^ Barkham, Patrick (10 November 2008). "The power of speech". The Guardian. London.
  10. ^ Middleton, Liz Else, Lucy (2008-01-19). "Interview: Daniel Everett". New Scientist. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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