6. Original caption for figure 4.2 (figure 2 in original volume): “Upper left: an example two tone-stimulus from the Pirahã study. Subjects were first presented the two-tone alone and asked to point to the location of an eye or person in the image. Red circles mark where Pirahã participants indicated an eye, and numbers indicate individual participants. Circles outside the image show responses of the form ‘there are no eyes here.’ Only two participants (2, 8) correctly pointed to an eye in this image during Stage 1. Upper right: Performance of Pirahã participants on the original photo, which was presented alone after the two-tone image was removed from view. All participants correctly pointed to one of the two eyes. Bottom row: performance of Pirahã participants on the two-tone image during Stage 3, when it was shown side-by-side with the photo. Two Pirahã participants succeeded uncued (2 and 8), two more succeeded with the photo present, indicating reorganization (3 and 4), and five did not show evidence of photo-triggered perceptual reorganization (1, 5, 6, 7, 9).”
7. Original caption for figure 4.3 (figure 3 in original volume): “Summary of results from the Pirahã and the two U.S. control groups. Bars show participants’ accuracy on photographs, practice items, and candidate reorganization trials (those trials on which the two-tone image was not recognized uncued). Error bars show the standard error of the mean.”
8. Yoon, Whitthoft, et al. (2014) continue: “Control participants in the misaligned condition—like the controls in the main experiment but unlike Pirahã participants—showed near perfect performance on candidate reorganization trials (94.2%). This result would be expected if control participants experienced reorganization, and their performance did not depend solely on a spatial alignment strategy to localize features.
“To summarize these observations statistically, we conducted a repeated measures ANOVA with a 3-level within-subject factor (trial type: practice items, photos, candidate reorganization trials) and a 3-level between subject factor (group: Pirahã, U.S. controls, U.S. misaligned condition). There was a main effect of group (F(2,23) = 32.6, η2 = 0.74, p<0.001) and a trial type x group interaction (F(4,48) = 8.35, η2= 0.41, p<0.001). Pairwise comparisons reveal that the Pirahã differ from both U.S. groups (ps<0.001), who do not differ from each other (Bonferroni corrected). Similarly, accuracy on candidate reorganization trials differs from accuracy on practice trials and photo recognition (ps<0.001), which do not differ from each other. A follow-up t-test compared Pirahã candidate reorganization performance to U.S. control performance in the misaligned condition (when U.S. controls do not have access to a non-recognition-based location matching strategy), showing that Pirahã performance was significantly lower (t(17) = 8.26, p<0.001).”
9. Orignal caption for figure 4.4 (figure 4 in original volume): “Example of misaligned photo and two-tone image pair. This image shows the actual degree of misalignment, but participants were never informed about the degree or direction of misalignment or even if any misalignment or distortion occurred between the images. The intersection of the horizontal and vertical red lines shows the same geometric point relative to the frame of the images. Participants could identify these matching points even without reference to the underlying images (for example, if the cards were blank). Actual corresponding features are shown with the red dot, and were displaced 1.8cm in a direction that varied from image pair to image pair.”
10. [coronal] means produced with the tip of the tongue; [voiced] refers to the vibrations of the vocal folds ([+voiced] = vocal cords vibrating; [–voiced] = vocal cords not vibrating during production of sound; [–continuant] means that the air is blocked before continuing out the mouth.
Chapter Five
1. Take from Ernst and Young’s website, “Our people—a diverse 21st-century workforce”: http://www.ey.com/US/en/About-us/Our-people-and-culture.
2. See http://www.holacracy.org.
3. I think that hierarchy is always a value in some sense, e.g., the owner’s decision to implement or halt holacracy, or to sell the company.
4. In this example, PROFIT and SHAREHOLDER are identical.
5. See in particular McCawley (1982) as a pioneering study of parentheticals in syntactic theory.
6. Though this word has been adapted to Pirahã phonology, it is a loanword of uncertain provenance.
7. This is not to say that there could not be other popular songs with conflicting messages, e.g., blaming the husband instead of the mistress. But hearers will pick and choose or try to blend conflicting ideas into a coherent whole. The effects of songs on dark matter are likely profound.
Chapter Six
1. See, for example, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Grimes 1975, Longacre 1976, Pike and Pike 1976, and Givón 1983.
2. In 2003 I filmed the entire process, from gathering the raw materials in the jungle to mixing the poison, to making the darts and the blowgun. Returning to the University of Manchester I placed my video recordings in the care of a postdoctoral associate to copy. Before she was able to work on them, however, all of my field data and equipment for that year, the tapes, cameras, and computer, were stolen from her ground-floor office.
3. Alternations with /t/s or involving different values for [continuant] or [voicing] are unattested.
4. Merge is a function that takes two objects (α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label. The label identifies the properties of the phrase. In Minimalism, no phrase structure can be formed without undergoing Merge. Since Merge is by definition a recursive operation, no language can exist without recursion, QED.
For example: Merge (α, β) → {α, {α, β}}
If α is a verb, e.g., eat and β a noun, e.g., eggs, then this will produce a verb phrase (i.e., where alpha is the head of the phrase) “eat eggs.” As I said in D. Everett (2012b), “The operation Merge incorporates two highly theory-internal assumptions that have been seriously challenged in recent literature. The first is that all grammatical structures are binary branching, since Merge can only produce such outputs. The second is that Merge requires that all syntactic structures be endocentric (i.e. headed by a unit of the same category as the containing structure, e.g. a noun heading a noun phrase a verb a verb phrase, etc.).”
5. Some linguists, in commenting on the Pirahã data, indicate that it is irrelevant to even the theory of grammar which says that recursion is the building block of all languages. This is because they are prepared to adopt a string of ancillary hypotheses to artificially render Pirahã unable to express its recursion. See D. Everett (2012b) for details.
6. It has long amused me that Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues’s (2009) paper is an attempt to refute me using my own earlier analysis and data. Replying to them is like having a debate with myself—the Dan Everett of thirty years of field experience among the Pirahãs vs. the Dan Everett of fourteen months of field experience, writing a PhD dissertation.
7. I use role and reference grammar here because to my mind it most effectively blends structural and functional-semantic principles into a theory of grammar. Nothing crucial hangs on this, however, and other theories might be compatible with the analysis offered here.
Chapter Seven
1. This is one reason that computers cannot be said to have language, in my opinion. For others, see D. Everett (2012a).
2. Sign languages, as McNeill makes clear in all of his work, represent a different case of combining static and dynamic gestures and diachronic as well as synchronic formation.
3. On the one hand, prosodies (pitch, length, intensity) often do have gesture-like functions (as many, including McNeill [1995, 2005, 2012], have observed). Thus based on work by Bolinger (1985, 1989), Lieberman (1967), Watson and Gibson (2004) and others, much of what is said about manual gestures also would apply to prosody. Thus there are both a functional and a formal distinction between speech and gesture.
4. Efron’s need for the services of Van Veen was due, of course, to the lack of adequate technology for recording gestures. With the advent of certain types of new equipment,
e.g. the cassette recorder, the laptop, and digital sound analysis, and—especially—quality portable video equipment, and so on, the course of linguistic history, as that of any science (or any culture in fact), took a different course, directed by the objects the culture produces for specific purposes. We tend to do more of the things we have more or better tools for. The better and more accessible the tools, the more the research they come to facilitate is undertaken. Tools alter science.
5. This study was part of the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879–1880, 1881, 263–552 (Washington: Government Printing Office).
6. I was perhaps incorrect in asserting that separate domains of study were called for to understand the dynamic vs. static. That remains to be seen.
7. The research program known as linguistic typology might be considered the field perspective on language, since it examines all languages as part of a vast linguistic matrix.
8. See D. Everett 1994 and 2015 for more discussion. At that time I argued for distinct theories for the analysis of each type of cognition, though I now believe that separate approaches may not be needed, especially in light of Pike’s urging us to study behavior as particle, wave, and field.
9. In this sense catchments are like discontinuous constituents in the syntax, such as ne . . . pas in French or even, Who did you wonder whether they were upset?
10. See Reinbold 2004 for an excellent analysis of discourse embedding in conversations in Banawá.
11. To say that this also entails that we use gestures without learning them, as McNeill seems to suggest, is unwarranted.
12. As Sascha Griffiths pointed out to me (e-mail, May 4, 2014) the gesture/speech equiprimordiality hypothesis avoids the nagging question of how long after we had gesture languages the human larynx would have waited to descend (see Lieberman 2007).
13. It is also worth noting that if McNeill’s story is on the right track, the contribution of Merge to the evolution of language was neither necessary nor sufficient.
14. Seen engaged in a discourse and using hand gestures of different types, in the YouTube video “Spoken Pirahã with Subtitles”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs.
15. For example, one plausible line of reasoning is that an alliance with dogs is what gave Homo sapiens the final advantage over neanderthalensis (Shipman 2015).
16. Taken from https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/justine-cassell, last accessed January 2016.
Chapter Eight
1. An example of homopraxis in conventions.
2. Sexual harassment cases often entail this kind of misunderstanding—that the offended party should have understood the offender’s emic perspective and then would know that there was no harm intended. But of course, one cannot assume in a society of strangers that one’s psyche is an open book.
3. See the YouTube video “‘Monolingual Fieldwork’ Demonstration” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU), sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America, for one such demonstration.
4. As David King (pers. comm.) points out to me, my conclusion here regarding indeterminacy of translation could be open to criticism because it would be possible—and this seems to be what Quine had in mind—for the translator not to know what they had misunderstood, because the native speaker and translator could respond behaviorally in the same way ostensibly, but with different mental maps from experience to meaning—one person responding to rabbit parts and the other to a whole rabbit. In the field, however, this is a difference without a difference. The field researcher does not nor would not notice this problem. But of course it is entirely possible that two people can talk in translatable ways, each one of them buttressed and understanding via distinct dark matters. It is not merely possible but, if I am correct, inescapable.
5. Religions are important to any discussion of translation because they perhaps rely on it and promote it more than any other entities. And their views on it are that it has eternal significance.
6. Wikipedia, s.v. “Quran translations,” last modified December 19, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_translations.
Chapter Nine
1. Whether Wittgenstein’s later work was also dogmatic but not recognized to be so by him is not a matter we address here.
2. In fact—as an aside for linguists—all grammatical theories can be summarized (with a bit of humor) as:
Summary of Relevance Theory: Don’t say more than you need to, but say what you have to.
Summary of Conversational Analysis: You can turn. You can keep going straight. You can stop.
Summary of Formal Linguistics and March Madness: It’s all in the brackets.
Summary of Nativism: It was there all along.
Summary of Construction Grammar: If some things must be memorized, why not most things?
Summary of Everett’s Cultural Grammar: Form is driven by meaning and meaning by culture.
Summary of Functional Linguistics: Form is driven by meaning.
Summary of Discourse Analysis: Know what you are talking about and how to make it clear.
Summary of Sociolinguistics: How many people really do that, when, and where?
Summary of Historical Linguistics: What was that?
3. Endocentricity is the property of a phrase headed by a word or phrase of the same category—VP headed by V, NP headed by N, etc.
4. And field researchers often have little time for arcane theoretical issues (though some make time), struggling with overwhelming complexity, disease, isolation, threats to their safety, and self-doubt, in easily the most challenging intellectual task of linguistics.
5. “It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate language structures] to “natural selection”, so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena” (Chomsky 1972, 97).
In his book Science of Language (Chomsky 2012, 105), Chomsky says much the same: “Tell them the truth about evolution, which is that selection plays some kind of role, but you don’t know how much until you know. It could be small, it could be large; it could [in principle] even be nonexistent.”
6. The Wikipedia definition of grammaticalization is “a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (nouns and verbs) transform to become grammatical markers (affixes, prepositions, etc.)” (Wikipedia, s.v. “grammaticalization,” last updated January 4, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization). For many researchers, however, grammaticalization has a meaning broader than simply word→affix changes. It can also mean anything that has become part of the rules or constraints that are posited as part of universal grammar or, even, anything that has become part of the grammatical rules or constraints of a particular language.
7. A syllable is a unit into which phonemes are arranged. There have been attempts to define the syllable phonetically (i.e., physically) as a single “chest pulse.” Many phoneticians believe that the syllable is poorly motivated either acoustically or physiologically. On the other hand, phonologists have developed elaborate models of syllables that analyze the unit into hierarchical structures of various types. The overall (but especially linear) arrangement of phonemes into syllables is referred to as phonotactics. Berent argues in effect that the organization of the syllable is based on a type of phonotactic instinct often referred to as the sonority sequencing generalization.
8. Sonority is a formal property of sounds in which it is easier to produce “spontaneous voicing” (vibration of the vocal folds while producing the sound), though the layperson can refer to sonority as relative loudness with little loss of accuracy.
9. For independent reasons—but reasons that once again show the inadequacy of the SSG—onsets are preferred to codas, thus favoring the syllabification of o.pa over op.a. The reason that a simple preference such as “prefer onsets” is a problem for the SSG is that the preference cl
early shows that SSG is unable to provide an adequate theory of syllabification (at least, on its own).
10. Formants are caused by resonance in the vocal tract. They are concentrations of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in the speech stream. Different formant frequencies and amplitudes result from changing shapes of the tract. For any given segment there will be several formants, each spaced at 1000 Hertz intervals. By resonance in the vocal tract, I mean a place in the vocal apparatus where there is a space for vibration—the mouth, the lips, the throat, the nasal cavity, and so on.
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