Event Details
Challenging Chomsky: Has a Remote Amazonian Language Changed our Understanding of Culture, Grammar, and Thinking? - Daniel Everett
| Date/Time: | Monday, 29 Sep 2008 at 8:00 pm |
| Location: | Sun Room, Memorial Union |
| Contact: | |
| Phone: | 515-294-9934 |
| Daniel L. Everett is chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Illinois State University. Everett began his linguistics work in 1977 as a missionary with SIL International (Summer Institute of Linguistics) in Brazil, where he studied the indigenous language Pirahã. He eventually began and completed an Sc.D. in linguistics at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). His current research is concerned with understanding how cultural values constrain language. Everett has concluded that Noam Chomsky's 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," has caused a controversy in the field of linguistics. The 2007-08 Quentin Johnson Lecture. Daniel Everett has lived in jungle villages for more than 7 years of my life and has conducted field research every year since 1977. On one of his research missions in 1993, he discovered a new language, Oro Win. Everett was married at age eighteen to Keren Graham, who was the daughter of Christian missionaries. The couple graduated with a degree in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1976. They then enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which trains missionaries how 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 SIL faculty had failed to learn in twenty years of study. In addition to his faculty position at Illinois State, Everett is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Cosponsored By:
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