From fieldwork to linguistic theory:
A tribute to Dan Everett

We will have 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

The Current Programs

Session 1

9:00-9:30
Intro + Talk / Ted Gibson

Compression, not infinity: The irrelevance of recursion to theories of language

9:30-9:50
In-person talk / Geoff Pullum

Daniel Everett on Pirahã Syntax

9:50-10:10
In-person talk / Robert Van Valin

How Language Began: A theoretical interpretation

10:10-10:30
In-person talk / Dafydd Gibbon

Cohesive rhythms: choral narrative in Ega

10:30-11:00
BREAK

Session 4

3:20-3:40
In-person talk / Caleb Everett

Quantitative assessments of some phonetic patterns in Pirahā

3:40-4:00
In-person talk / Andras Kornai

What is the simplest semantics imaginable?

4:00-4:20
In-person talk / Jeannette Sakel

Investigating grammatical borrowing in Mosetén through the lens of historical sources

4:20-4:40
BREAK

Session 2

11:00-11:20
In-person talk / Ev Fedorenko

A journey into Dan Everett’s brain

11:20-11:40
In-person talk / Iris Berent

Why is UG such a hard question?

11:40-12:00
In-person talk / Sascha Griffiths

Monolingual Fieldwork as Hypothesis Testing: Reflections on Research Methods in Linguistic Fieldwork

12:00-1:30
LUNCH

Session 5

4:40-5:00
In-person talk / Adele Goldberg

Constructions are Emergent Generalizations

5:00-5:20
In-person talk / Steve Piantadosi

Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

5:20-5:40
Closing Remarks / Dan Everett

Session 3

1:30-1:45
Remote talk / Marianne Mithun

Where are the Universals? Complexities of Place

1:45-2:00
Remote talk / Bob Levine

The Peircean turn in linguistics: syntactic-semantic composition as logical inference

2:00-2:15
Remote talk / David Gil

Hierarchical Structure in Malay/Indonesian

2:15-2:30
Remote talk / Yaron Senderowicz

Desiring to Desire: The First-Person Perspective and Second-Order Desires

2:30-2:45
Remote talk / Delia Bentley

When projections meet constructions: anticausativization in Italian

2:45-3:00
Remote talk / Sally Thomason

Transitivity in Séliš-Ql’ispé

3:00-3:20
BREAK

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.