In this work, in order to clearly circumscribe our goals, we take semantic and discourse structure to be conceptually independent of syntactic structure, as in. The conception of syntax here is purely about the combinatorial properties of well-formed sentences, without regard to semantic or discourse relations, which may have recursive structure of their own. Here, we aim to move past the “recursion debate” and provide data relevant to characterizing the complexity of Pirahã in terms of well-established concepts from formal language theory. In our view, much of this prior debate is over essentially terminological issues which are orthogonal to an important and fascinating empirical program of characterizing what structures are present and absent in human language very broadly. We had this in mind when we noted in NP&R that if Pirahã really were a language whose fundamental rule is a non-recursive variant of Merge, no sentence in Pirahã could contain more than two words.” Pirahã clearly meets this narrow sense of recursion because it does have sentences longer than two words. write, “Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002, HC&F) presupposed, rightly or wrongly, an approach to syntactic structure in which all phrase structure-not just clausal embedding or possessor recursion-serves as a demonstration of recursion.
SYNTAX GOALS FOR GOOD NIGHT OWL FULL
“Bill played accordion.”) is recursive in this sense because it has re-applied Merge to its own output in order to derive the full sentence structure via the formal tools of Minimalism. Any sentence with more than two words (e.g. argued that the key sense of recursion relevant to HCF is instead that of repeated application of a binary structure-building operation, Merge (for more on this debate, see ). In contrast, Everett argued that the Pirahã language lacked such embedding and indeed has an upper-bounded sentence length. 1571) (For detailed discussions of this and related issues, see ). HCF do not define the term, instead giving only the example of sentential embedding: “There is no longest sentence (any candidate sentence can be trumped by, for example, embedding it in ‘Mary thinks that …’), and there is no non-arbitrary upper bound to sentence length.” (p.
Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (henceforth HCF) argue that recursion is the unique and defining feature of human language, contrasting the rich productivity and structure observed in human language with the relatively restricted systems of animal communication. To date, one of the most compelling hypothesized universals is recursion, a computational mechanism that is central to modern linguistics, yet is frequently discussed with considerable terminological and conceptual sloppiness (see ).
Linguistic universals-if any exist (see )-would point to deep properties of the cognitive mechanisms supporting language at the same time, the search for possible universals and violations of universals creates rich data for linguistic theory. One of the most important empirical programs in cognitive science and linguistics aims to characterize the range of possible human languages. We find that the corpus is plausibly consistent with an analysis of Pirahã as a regular language, although this is not the only plausible analysis. We do not find unambiguous evidence for recursive embedding of sentences or noun phrases in the corpus. In particular, we search for sentences which could be analyzed as containing center-embedding, sentential complements, adverbials, complementizers, embedded possessors, conjunction or disjunction.
We use the corpus to investigate the formal complexity of Pirahã syntax by searching for evidence of syntactic embedding. In the corpus, Pirahã sentences have been shallowly parsed and given morpheme-aligned English translations. We make the corpus freely available for further research. Here, we present an analysis of a novel corpus of natural Pirahã speech that was originally collected by Dan Everett and Steve Sheldon. The Pirahã language has been at the center of recent debates in linguistics, in large part because it is claimed not to exhibit recursion, a purported universal of human language.
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