Research

My early research was concerned primarily with the basic subfields of linguistics: field research, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, semantics, and pragmatics. However, in addition to publishing in all of these areas, I have gone on to publish research on anthropology and philosophy, especially in American Pragmatism and the work and life of Charles Sanders Peirce.

CV Google Scholar profile ResearchGate profile

Daniel Everett reading notes while a Piraha child smiles to the camera — The late UCLA phonetician, Peter Ladefoged, working with Dan in Brazil on the stress systems of Pirahã and other Amazonian languages. Porto Velho, 1995.

The books that followed progressively broadened this research program. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes placed my Pirahã research in its human and cultural setting; Language: The Cultural Tool developed the case that language is a cultural achievement rather than an innate faculty. With Jeanette Sakel, I wrote Linguistic Fieldwork to promote an approach attentive to the relation between language and culture. Dark Matter of the Mind examined culture’s role in cognition and the unconscious, while How Language Began traced the evolutionary history of language. This work ultimately led me toward a Peircean philosophy of language, grounded in semiotics and pragmatism as an empiricist alternative to the Cartesian tradition underlying much modern linguistics.

Selected Publications

1983

Dissertation

A Língua Pirahã e a Teoria da Sintaxe

Daniel L. Everett · Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), ScD dissertation

My ScD dissertation (Doctorate in Science) written in Portuguese at UNICAMP is the foundational document for my academic and research career from 1983 to the present. It was written after five years of research and thinking about the Pirahã language (I have completed nearly forty more years of research on Pirahã since completing my doctorate). I have changed my mind about a few points of the analysis, but overall, it still reflects my views on much of the language.

Syntax
Pirahã
Documentation

PDF · 5.9 MB

2005

Article

Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language

Daniel L. Everett · Current Anthropology, 46(4), 621–646

The final paper on Cultural Constraints on Language and Cognition in Pirahã is my most ambitious paper on culture and cognition, prefiguring my books, Dark Matter of the Mind and Language: The Cultural Tool. It is my most-cited paper.

Culture & cognition
Pirahã
Recursion

PDF · 331 KB DOI

2008

Article

Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition

Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko & Edward Gibson · Cognition, 108(3), 819–824

In 2005, I claimed that the Pirahã language lacked all numbers and counting. This controversial claim was then tested in the field during a visit by both MIT professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Ted Gibson, and Mike Frank, Stanford professor of psychology. The paper here confirms and elaborates further on my 2005 claim about numerical cognition and culture in the language.

Cognition
Pirahã
Number

PDF · 325 KB DOI

2012

Article

What does Pirahã grammar have to teach us about human language and the mind?

Daniel L. Everett · WIREs Cognitive Science, 3(6), 555–563

The WIREs CogSci article was invited by the editors and reviews the theoretical significance of the claims of Everett 2005, at the same time that it attempts to answer objections subsequently raised against those claims. It is intended also as an overview article of cognition, culture, and language in Pirahã.

Recursion
Culture & cognition
Pirahã

PDF · 152 KB DOI

2020

Article

Semiotics and the Origin of Language in the Lower Palaeolithic

Lawrence Barham & Daniel L. Everett · Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 28, 535–579

The paper by Larry Barham and me on archaeological evidence for the claim (originally made in my book, How Language Began) is an important collaboration with one of the leading paleoanthropologists specializing in Homo erectus. Larry joins me in claiming that the evidence is strong that erectus was the first member of the Homo genus to invent language.