From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett

Edward Gibson (ed), Moshe Poliak (ed)

Synopsis

Dan Everett is a renowned linguist with an unparalleled breadth of contributions, ranging from fieldwork to linguistic theory, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of linguistics. Born on the U.S. Mexican border, Daniel Everett faced much adversity growing up and was sent as a missionary to convert the Pirahã in the Amazonian jungle, a group of people who speak a language that no outsider had been able to become proficient in. Although no Pirahã person was successfully converted, Everett successfully learned and studied Pirahã, as well as multiple other languages in the Americas. Ever steadfast in pursuing data-driven language science, Everett debunked generativist claims about syntactic recursion, for which he was repeatedly attacked. In addition to conducting fieldwork with many understudied languages and revolutionizing linguistics, Everett has published multiple works for the general public: "Don’t sleep, there are snakes, Language: The cultural tool, and how language began". This book is a collection of 15 articles that are related to Everett’s work over the years, released after a tribute event for Dan Everett that was held at MIT on June 8th 2023.

Chapters

  • Anarchy, power, festschrifts and universals
    Stefan Müller
    Chapter 0
  • Composition, not infinity
    The irrelevance of recursion to theories of language
    Edward Gibson
    Chapter 1
  • Daniel Everett on Pirahã syntax
    Geoffrey K. Pullum
    Chapter 2
  • How language began
    A theoretical interpretation
    Robert D. Van Valin Jr.
    Chapter 3
  • Cohesive rhythms
    Choral narrative in Ega
    Dafydd Gibbon
    Chapter 4
  • Why is UG such a hard question?
    Iris Berent
    Chapter 5
  • Just where are the universals?
    Complexities of place
    Marianne Mithun
    Chapter 6
  • A Peircean turn in linguistics
    Syntactic-semantic composition as logical inference
    Robert Levine
    Chapter 7
  • Hierarchical syntactic structure in Malay/Indonesian, between Pirahã and Had Gadya
    David Gil
    Chapter 8
  • The first-person perspective and second-order desires
    Yaron M. Senderowicz
    Chapter 9
  • The causative alternation in Italian
    A case study in the parallel architecture of grammar
    Delia Bentley
    Chapter 10
  • Transitivity in Séliš-Ql’ispé
    Sarah G. Thomason, Daniel Everett
    Chapter 11
  • Contextualizing typologically remarkable sound patterns in Pirahã
    A quantitative approach
    Caleb Everett
    Chapter 12
  • What is the simplest semantics imaginable?
    András Kornai
    Chapter 13
  • Investigating grammatical borrowing in Mosetén through historical sources
    Jeanette Sakel
    Chapter 14
  • Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language
    Steven T. Piantadosi
    Chapter 15

Statistics

From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett

Biographies

Edward Gibson, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Edward Gibson is a professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He finished his BSc at Queens University (Kingston, Canada) in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1985; he did a M Phil in computer speech and language processing at Cambridge University (UK, 1986), and he did a PhD in computational linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University (1991). He has been at MIT BCS since 1993. He works on many aspects of human language: what makes language easy and hard to produce and understand, and how this affects the potential structures that occur in human languages. He also competed in the 1984 Olympic games in rowing, coming 7th in the coxless fours for Canada.

Moshe Poliak

Moshe Poliak is a PhD student at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences under the supervision of Edward Gibson. He completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at Harvard University. He investigates how cognition shapes the manner of language production, and how the manner of production is used by comprehenders to infer the intention of the producer. His work spans speech and text, multiple languages, and behavioral and neural methods.

cover image

Downloads

PDF
Bibliography
Buy from Amazon.de
Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Buy from Amazon.com
Collaborative reading on Paperhive

Published

September 14, 2024
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax

Print ISSN

2366-3529
Cite as
Gibson, Edward & Poliak, Moshe (eds.). 2024. From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett. (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax 15). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11351540
Copyright (c) 2023 Stefan Müller

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-473-4

doi

10.5281/zenodo.11351540

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-102-7

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm