From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett

We had a workshop celebrating the career of Dan Everett, in the Singleton Auditorium, Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department, (43 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA 02139). MIT, June 8, 2023, 9am-6pm

All the recordings from the event can be found here

In National Geographic’s much-reviewed and discussed 2023 documentary “The Mission,” I am one of the main characters. It was an honor and a pleasure to be a part of this film, appearing at premieres in Telluride, Hollywood, and Hot Springs. The film is about the death of would-be missionary John Chau among the Sentinelese. I express my disapproval of missionary work and supernatural beliefs. But since I once was a missionary and once held those beliefs myself, I am careful not to condemn Chau’s motives, only his actions. I make it clear, as the last voice in the film, that if the Sentinelese do not desire contact with the outside world, we must respect that.

In Kino Lorber’s film, I am included as the subject of Tom Wolfe’s last book, Kingdom of Speech, and I express my admiration for Tom and his concern with the facts and his desire to take down phonies (as he saw them).

Some of Dan’s Important Work

SEMANTICS, SYNTAX AND ANTHROPOLOGY:

  • Everett, D. L. (1986). Pirahã. Handbook of Amazonian languages, pp. 211-326. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Everett, D. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language. Current anthropology, 46(4), 621-646.
  • Everett, D. L. (2012). Language: The cultural tool. Vintage.
  • Everett, D. L. (2017). Dark matter of the mind: the culturally articulated unconscious. University of Chicago Press.
  • Everett, D. L. (to appear). Lessons From Peirce: On the Philosophy and Practice of Linguistics, Oxford University Press.

PHONOLOGY

  • Everett, D., & Everett, K. (1984). On the relevance of syllable onsets to stress placement. Linguistic Inquiry, 705-711.
  • The onset-sensitive stress system of Piraha and Banawa; and the largest system of syllable weights known at the time
  • Everett, D. L. (1988). On metrical constituent structure in Pirahã phonology. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 6(2), 207-246.
  • Ternary branching in Pirahã phonology (at a time when most phonologists claimed that all phonological branching was binary)

MORPHOLOGY

  • Everett, D. L. (2005). Periphrastic pronouns in Wari’. International journal of American linguistics, 71(3), 303-326.
  • Periphrasis as a productive pronoun formation pattern in Wari; and Wari is a language without personal pronouns

DISCOVERY OF A NEW LANGUAGE

  • Everett, D. L. (1996). Oro Win and Chapakuran: evidence for Greenberg’s Arawan-Chapakuran connection?’. Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
  • Working with native speakers, Everett identified Oro Win as a distinct language in the Tchapakuran family

POPULAR BOOKS

  • Everett, D. (2010). Don’t sleep, there are snakes: Life and language in the Amazonian jungle. Random House.
  • Everett, D. (2017). How language began: The story of humanity’s greatest invention. Liveright-W.W. Norton.