Dan Everett, Illinois State University, Normal

Linguistic Lessons from Amazonian Alterity

Kenneth Pike used to say that 'languages are very different from one another. But they are not utterly different, or linguistics would not exist'. But what are the parameters within which human languages may vary? To know this, field research on languages must not only consider the ways in which languages are alike but must pay careful attention, perhaps most of its attention, to the ways in which languages are different. In this study we look at examples of salient differences of Pirahã and Wari', two Amazonian languages, and consider what these have to tell us about the enterprise of linguistics. Pirahã lacks certain characteristics & concepts (recursion, numbers, quantification of at least certain types) that some researchers expect to find in all languages. Wari' possess a certain construction type that seems to wreak havoc with the idea that phrase structure is endocentric, an idea that has taken over much of linguistics in recent years. These two endangered languages show us how far off our theories of language, culture, and cognition would be if we didn't have such data and they underscore again the urgency of documenting and describing as many of the world's languages as we are able.