A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirahã.

Richard Futrell,Edward Gibson,Laura Stearns,Daniel L. Everett,Steven T. Piantadosi,Mark Aronoff

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145289

Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145289

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Abstract

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. Here, we present an analysis of a novel corpus of natural Pirahã speech that was originally collected by Dan Everett and Steve Sheldon. We make the corpus freely available for further research. In the corpus, Pirahã sentences have been shallowly parsed and given morpheme-aligned English translations. We use the corpus to investigate the formal complexity of Pirahã syntax by searching for evidence of syntactic embedding. In particular, we search for sentences which could be analyzed as containing center-embedding, sentential complements, adverbials, complementizers, embedded possessors, conjunction or disjunction. We do not find unambiguous evidence for recursive embedding of sentences or noun phrases in the corpus. 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.

Highlights

One of the most important empirical programs in cognitive science and linguistics aims to characterize the range of possible human languages
In our discussion we tentatively address two questions: (i) Does Pirahã grammar allow recursive embedding? (ii) Can Pirahã be reasonably analyzed as a regular language? By recursive embedding, we refer to the ability of one linguistic unit to contain units of the same type
In order to flesh out our claim that the corpus is consistent with a regular grammar, we give here a regular expression which is consistent with the corpus

Summary

Introduction

One of the most important empirical programs in cognitive science and linguistics aims to characterize the range of possible human languages. Linguistic universals—if any exist (see [1, 2])—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 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 [3, 4]). Chomsky & Fitch [5] ( 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. HCF do not define the term, instead giving only the example of sentential embedding: “There is no longest sentence

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