Forthcoming: From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett

Edward Gibson   Moshe Poliak  

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

Published

December 14, 2023
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax
Cite as
Gibson, Edward & Poliak, Moshe (eds.). Forthcoming. From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett. (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2023 Stefan Müller

License

Creative Commons License

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