The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place

Science News,  Dec 10, 2005  by Bruce Bower

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The lack of recursion "is perhaps the strangest feature of Piraha language," Everett says.

For instance, the Piraha have no way to say, "When I finish eating, I want to speak to you." The closest corresponding expression best translates as "I finish eating. I speak to you." The speaker employs two independent sentences rather than an initial clause and additional information making it meaningful.

Recursion expands the time scale of what one can talk about. The ancient past and the distant future become fair game. That's forbidden verbal territory among the Piraha, Everett emphasizes.

This cultural habit has also shaped the Piraha tendency to speak in two basic tenses, he adds. These tenses distinguish between events that either are or are not in the immediate control or experience of the speaker.

In another limitation of the language, Piraha kinship terms refer only to known, living relatives. They tend to refer, for example, to a grandparent by the individual's name rather than as a parent of a parent.

A focus on immediate experience goes a long way toward explaining why the Piraha tell neither creation myths nor stories about the ancient past, Everett adds.

Everett suspects that individual Piraha ponder past events and think in other recursive ways but can't express such thoughts with their language.

The possible existence of a language devoid of recursion strikes a sensitive nerve among linguists. Some, such as W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh, and Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), regard recursion as a crucial element of language.

In an upcoming Cognition, Fitch and his colleagues briefly address the challenge that Piraha speech presents to their perspective. If it's truly recursionfree, then they regard it as a rare exception. "Our language faculty provides us with a toolkit for building languages, but not all languages use all the tools," they say.

MIT linguist David Pesetsky, who attended a lecture on the Piraha given by Everett at a scientific meeting in September, says that the language appears to operate much like languages elsewhere on general characteristics, such as word order. He's unconvinced that the language lacks features found in all others.

Stephen C. Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, offers a different view. He holds that a more thorough consideration would turn up the missing parts of grammar rather than making the Piraha "sound like the mindless bearers of an almost subhumanly simple culture."

NOT SO SPECIAL Perhaps the most common question that Everett fields from his critics concerns the apparent uniqueness of Piraha speech. Why, they ask, is this the only known language to display such an unusual grammar?

His response: Piraha probably isn't so special. Everett lived within the tribe for several field seasons before he started to speak its language well and has continued to hone his fluency over the equivalent of 7 years. Hard-earned intimacy with the language revealed subtle word meanings and structural elements that are easy to miss or misinterpret, Everett says.