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'Daniel L. Everett' (born 1951 in Holtville, California^[1]) is a linguistics professor who currently serves as Chairperson of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He previously taught at the University of Manchester and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh.
Professor Everett has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue his lifework: the study of the Pirahã language and culture.
On one of his research missions in 1993, he discovered a new language, the Oro Win language, which is one of the few languages that uses the rare voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (phonetically, [t͡ʙ̥]).

Contents

Early life

Education in linguistics

The Chomsky debate

References

External links

Early life

Everett was married at age 18 to Keren Graham, who was the daughter of Christian missionaries. The couple graduated with a degree in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1976. They then enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.), which trains missionaries how to quickly learn foreign languages so that they can go into remote areas, learn the language, and then translate the Bible into that language.
Because Everett quickly demonstrated a gift for language, he was invited to study Pirahã, which the S.I.L. faculty had failed to learn in 20 years of study. In 1977, the couple and their three children moved to Brazil, where they studied Portuguese for a year before moving to a Pirahã village at the mouth of the Maici River in the Lowland Amazonia region.^[2]

Education in linguistics

Everett had some initial success learning the language, but when the S.I.L. lost their contract with the Brazilian government, Everett enrolled in the fall of 1978 at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, under the auspices of which he could continue to study Pirahã. Everett focused on the theories of Noam Chomsky and in his Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1983, he did a Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã.^[3]

The Chomsky debate

Everett eventually concluded that the Chomsky framework of universal grammar, the fundamental principle of recursion in particular, didn't obtain in Pirahã. His 2005 article in ''Current Anthropology'', titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,"^[4] has caused a controversy in the field of linguistics.^[5]

References

1. Curriculum vitae.
2. John Colapinto, "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?", The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, pp. 121-122.
3. John Colapinto, "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?", The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, p. 125.
4. Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005, pp. 621-46.
5. John Colapinto, "The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?", The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, pp. 127-137.

External links

★ Daniel Everett's homepage

★ Article in University of Pittsburgh University Times

★ Professor Everett as a child