From fieldwork to linguistic theory:
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.