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Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã Another Look at the Design
Features of Human Language
Author(s): Daniel L. Everett
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (August/October 2005), pp. 621-646
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005
䉷 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4604-0006$10.00

It does not seem likely . . . that there is any direct

relation between the culture of a tribe and the lan-
Cultural Constraints guage they speak, except in so far as the form of the
language will be moulded by the state of the cul-
on Grammar and ture, but not in so far as a certain state of the cul-
ture is conditioned by the morphological traits of
the language.
Cognition in Pirahã f r a n s b o a s , 1911

In the early days of American descriptive linguistics, lan-

guage was seen as an emergent property of human cul-
Another Look at the Design ture and psychology.1 Except for small pockets of re-
searchers here and there, for various reasons both
Features of Human Language so-called formal and functional linguistics abandoned
the investigation of culture-language connections.2 In re-
cent years there has been a welcome revival of interest
by Daniel L. Everett in the influence of language on culture and cognition,
especially in more sophisticated investigations of the lin-
guistic-relativity/determinism hypothesis (e.g., Lucy

1. I thank the Pirahã for their friendship and help for more than
The Pirahã language challenges simplistic application of Hock- half of my life. Since 1977 the people have taught me about their
ett’s nearly universally accepted design features of human lan- language and way of understanding the world. I have lived for over
guage by showing that some of these features (interchangeability, six years in Pirahã villages and have visited the people every year
displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained. In since 1977. I speak the language well and can say anything I need
particular, Pirahã culture constrains communication to nonab- to say in it, subject to the kinds of limitations discussed in this
stract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of in- paper. I have not published on Pirahã culture per se, but I have
terlocutors. This constraint explains a number of very surprising observed it closely for all of these years and have discussed most
features of Pirahã grammar and culture: the absence of numbers of my observations, including those reported on here, with the Pir-
of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quanti- ahã themselves. My wife, Keren, is the only non-Pirahã to have
fication, the absence of color terms, the absence of embedding, lived longer among the Pirahã than I. She has offered invaluable
the simplest pronoun inventory known, the absence of “relative help, strong criticism, and inspiration in my studies of the Pirahã
tenses,” the simplest kinship system yet documented, the ab- language over the years. Peter Gordon’s enthusiasm for studying
sence of creation myths and fiction, the absence of any individ- Pirahã counting experimentally has challenged me to consider the
ual or collective memory of more than two generations past, the absence of Pirahã numerals in a wider cultural and linguistic con-
absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material text. I thank David Gil of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
cultures documented, and the fact that the Pirahã are monolin- Anthropology in Leipzig for organizing the “Numerals” conference
gual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians there (March 28 and 29, 2004) and the Institute’s Linguistics De-
and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv. partment for offering me ideal circumstances in which to rough
out the bulk of this paper. I also thank (in no particular order) Ray
d a n i e l l . e v e r e t t is Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Jackendoff, Lila Gleitman, Timothy Feist, Bill Poser, Nigel Vincent,
in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manches- Keren Everett, Arlo Heinrichs, Steve Sheldon, Pattie Epps, Tony
ter (Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. [dan.everett@manchester.ac.uk]). Woodbury, Brent Berlin, Tom Headland, Terry Kaufman, Grev Cor-
Born in 1951, he received a Sc.D. from the State University of bett, Peter Gordon, Sally Thomason, Alec Marantz, Donca Steriade,
Campinas, Brazil, in 1983 and has taught linguistics there Craige Roberts, Mary Beckman, Peter Culicover, and Iris Berent for
(1981–86) and at the University of Pittsburgh (1988–99). His comments of varying detail on this paper and Paul Kay for asking
publications include A lingua pirahã e a teoria da sintaxe (Cam- challenging questions about my statements on color terms that
pinas: Editora da UNICAMP, 1992), (with Barbara Kern) Wari’ helped me sharpen my thinking about this enormously. Tom Head-
Descriptive Grammar (London: Routledge, 1997), and “Coherent land deserves special mention for giving me detailed help on how
Fieldwork,” in Linguistics Today, edited by Piet van Sterkenberg to make my ethnographic summary more intelligible to anthro-
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004). The present paper was sub- pologists. This paper supersedes any other published or unpublished
mitted 12 iv 04 and accepted 4 iii 05. statement by me on those aspects of Pirahã grammar here ad-
dressed. No one should draw the conclusion from this paper that
[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of this the Pirahã language is in any way “primitive.” It has the most
issue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago. complex verbal morphology I am aware of and a strikingly complex
edu/CA/home.html).] prosodic system. The Pirahã are some of the brightest, pleasantest,
most fun-loving people that I know. The absence of formal fiction,
myths, etc., does not mean that they do not or cannot joke or lie,
both of which they particularly enjoy doing at my expense, always
good-naturedly. Questioning Pirahã’s implications for the design
features of human language is not at all equivalent to questioning
their intelligence or the richness of their cultural experience and
knowledge.
2. It is ironic that linguists of the “functional” persuasion should
ignore culture’s potential impact on grammar, given the fact that
functional linguistics inherited from generative semantics the view
that form is driven largely by meaning (and, more recently, by gen-
eral cognitive constraints as well) because the locus and source of
meaning for any human are principally in the culture.

621

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622 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

1992a, b; Gumperz and Levinson 1996; Gentner and Gol- viving member of the Muran language family. However,
din-Meadow 2003). However, there has been insufficient after considering the implications of this unusual feature
work on the constraints that culture can place on major of Pirahã language and culture, I came to the conclusion
grammatical structures in a language, though Pawley defended in this paper, namely, that there is an important
(1987) and the contributors to Enfield (2002), among oth- relation between the absence of number, numerals, and
ers, have produced some important results. counting, on the one hand, and the striking absence of
This paper looks in detail at various aspects of the other forms of precision quantification in Pirahã seman-
culture and language of the Pirahã of Brazil that suggest tics and culture, on the other. A summary of the sur-
that Pirahã culture severely constrains Pirahã grammar prising facts will include at least the following: Pirahã
in several ways, producing an array of otherwise inex- is the only language known without number, numerals,
plicable “gaps” in Pirahã morphosyntax. These con- or a concept of counting. It also lacks terms for quan-
straints lead to the startling conclusion that Hockett’s tification such as “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” and
(1960) design features of human language, even more “some.” It is the only language known without color
widely accepted among linguists than Chomsky’s pro- terms. It is the only language known without embedding
posed universal grammar, must be revised. With respect (putting one phrase inside another of the same type or
to Chomsky’s proposal, the conclusion is severe—some lower level, e.g., noun phrases in noun phrases, sentences
of the components of so-called core grammar are subject in sentences, etc.). It has the simplest pronoun inventory
to cultural constraints, something that is predicted not known, and evidence suggests that its entire pronominal
to occur by the universal-grammar model. I argue that inventory may have been borrowed. It has no perfect
these apparently disjointed facts about the Pirahã lan- tense. It has perhaps the simplest kinship system ever
guage—gaps that are very surprising from just about any documented. It has no creation myths—its texts are al-
grammarian’s perspective—ultimately derive from a sin- most always descriptions of immediate experience or in-
gle cultural constraint in Pirahã, namely, the restriction terpretations of experience; it has some stories about the
of communication to the immediate experience of the past, but only of one or two generations back. Pirahã in
interlocutors. general express no individual or collective memory of
Grammar and other ways of living are restricted to more than two generations past. They do not draw, ex-
concrete, immediate experience (where an experience is cept for extremely crude stick figures representing the
immediate in Pirahã if it has been seen or recounted as spirit world that they (claim to) have directly exper-
seen by a person alive at the time of telling), and im- ienced.
mediacy of experience is reflected in immediacy of in- In addition, the following facts provide additional
formation encoding—one event per utterance.3 Less ex- overt evidence for ways in which culture can be causally
plicitly, the paper raises the possibility, subject to further implicated in the linguistic structure of the language:
research, that culture constrains cognition as well. If the The phonemic inventory of Pirahã women is the small-
assertion of cultural constraint is correct, then it has est in the world, with only seven consonants and three
important consequences for the enterprise of linguistics. vowels, while the men’s inventory is tied with Rotokas
Before beginning in earnest, I should say something and Hawaiian for the next-smallest inventory, with only
about my distinction between “culture” and “language.” eight consonants and three vowels (Everett 1979). The
To linguists this is a natural distinction. To anthropol- Pirahã people communicate almost as much by singing,
ogists it is not. My own view of the relationship is that whistling, and humming as they do using consonants
the anthropological perspective is the more useful, but and vowels (Everett 1985, 2004). Pirahã prosody is very
that is exactly what this paper purports to show. There- rich, with a well-documented five-way weight distinc-
fore, although I begin with what will strike most an- tion between syllable types (Everett 1979, 1988; Everett
thropologists as a strange division between the form of and Everett 1984).
communication (language) and the ways of meaning (cul- A final fascinating feature of Pirahã culture, which I
ture) from which it emerges, my conclusion is that the will argue to follow from the above, is that Pirahã con-
division is not in fact a very useful one and that Sapir, tinue to be monolingual in Pirahã after more than 200
Boas, and the anthropological tradition generally have years of regular contact with Brazilians and other non-
this right. In this sense, this paper may be taken as an Pirahã. What we will see as the discussion progresses is
argument that anthropology and linguistics are more that Portuguese grammar and communication violate
closely aligned than most modern linguists (whether the Pirahã cultural constraint on grammar and living, a
“functional” or “formal”) suppose. profound cultural value, leading to an explanation for
This study began as a description of the absence of this persistent monolingualism.
numerals, number, and counting in Pirahã, the only sur- Any of these properties is sufficiently unusual in itself
to demand careful consideration, but their manifestation
3. The notion of “event” used in this paper—a single logical pred- in a single language suggests the existence of a common
icate—comes from the standard literature on lexical semantics. unifying generalization behind them. They are suffi-
Such predicates can be modified but are represented as solitary ciently disparate formally (i.e., in terms of potential
events (see Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 for one model). This is not
to say that a single event cannot be expressed by more than one phrase-structure realizations) that any unifying principle
utterance but merely that multiple events are not expressed in a is almost certainly to be found in their meaning, and
single utterance/sentence. that in the broadest sense of a constraint on cultural

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 623

function. What I propose, again, is that Pirahã culture There are three words in Pirahã that are easy to confuse
avoids talking about knowledge that ranges beyond per- with numerals because they can be translated as nu-
sonal, usually immediate experience or is transmitted merals in some of their uses:4 hói ‘small size or amount’,
via such experience. All of the properties of Pirahã gram- hoı́ ‘somewhat larger size or amount’, and bá a gi so lit.
mar that I have listed will be shown to follow from this. ‘cause to come together’ (loosely ‘many’). Some examples
Abstract entities are not bound by immediate personal which show how Pirahã expresses what in other cultures
experience, and therefore Pirahã people do not discuss would be numerical concepts are as follows:
them.
5. a. tı́ ’ı́tı́i’isi hói hii ’aba’áı́gio ’oogabagaı́
In developing the arguments to support these theses,
I fish small predicate only want
I also argue against the simple Whorfian idea that lin-
“I only want [one/a couple/a small] fish.” (This
guistic relativity or determinism alone can account for
could not be used to express a desire for one
the facts under consideration. In fact, I also argue that
fish that was very large except as a joke.)
the unidirectionality inherent in linguistic relativity of-
b. tiobáhai hói hii
fers an insufficient tool for language-cognition connec-
child small predicate
tions more generally in that it fails to recognize the fun-
”small child/child is small/one child”
damental role of culture in shaping language. In what
follows I describe the properties of Pirahã grammar men-
tioned above, consider the facts in light of Pirahã cultural 6. a. tı́ ’ı́tı́i’isi hoı́ hii ’oogabagaı́
values, and discuss the lessons to be drawn from the case I fish larger predicate want
of Pirahã for linguistic theory. I do not claim that my “I want [a few/larger/several] fish.”
thesis or its relation to the facts has been proven; rather, b. tı́ ’ı́tı́i’isi báagiso ’oogabagaı́
I suggest that the relation has been supported and that I fish many/group want
there is no other obvious relation. Any other approach “I want [a group of/many] fish.”
would render the above-mentioned observations coin- c. tı́ ’ı́tı́i’isi ’ogiı́ ’oogabagaı́
cidental. I fish big want
“I want [a big/big pile of/many] fish.”
Interestingly, in spite of its lack of number and nu-
Number, Numerals, and Counting merals, Pirahã superficially appears to have a count-ver-
sus-mass distinction (examples preceded by an asterisk are
There is no grammatical number in Pirahã (Everett 1983, ungrammatical, and those preceded by a question mark
1986; Corbett 2000). There are therefore no number con- would be considered strange):
trasts on nouns, pronouns, verbs, or modifiers for number 7. a. ’aoói ’aaı́bái ’ao’aagá ’oı́ kapió’io
(´ p high tone; no mark over vowel p low tone; ’ p foreigner many exist jungle other
glottal stop): “There are many foreigners in another jungle.”
1. hiaitı́ihı́ hi kaoáı́bogi bai -aagá b. ∗/? ’aoói ’apagı́ ’ao’aagá ’oı́ kapió’io
Pirahã people he evil spirit fear -be foreigner much exist jungle other
“The Pirahã are afraid of evil spirits,” “A Pirahã is ?”There are much foreigners in another jungle.”
afraid of an evil spirit,” “The Pirahã are afraid of an
evil spirit,” or “ A Pirahã is afraid of evil spirits.” 8. a. ’agaı́si ’apagı́ ’ao’aagá ’oı́ kapió’io
manioc meal much exist jungle other
2. kó’oı́, kóhoibiı́hai, hi pı́ai, ’aáibı́gaı́, “There is a lot of manioc meal in another jungle.”
name name he also, name b. ∗’agaı́si ’aaı́bái ’ao’aagá ’oı́ kapió’io
hi pı́ai, hi koabáipı́ manioc meal many exist jungle other
∗
he also, he die “There is many manioc meal in another jungle.”
“Kó’oı́, Kóhoibiı́hai, and ’aáibigaı́ died.” This distinction is more consistently analyzed, how-
ever, as the distinction between things that can be in-
3. kó’oı́ hi koabáipı́ dividuated and things that cannot, thus independent of
name he die the notion of counting.
“Kó’oı́ died.” There are likewise no ordinal numbers in Pirahã. Some
of the functions of ordinals are expressed via body parts,
4. báigipóhoaá ’i ’óooı́ kobai -baaı́ in a way familiar to many languages:
name:feminine she tarantula watch -intently
“Báigipóhoaá watched the tarantula[s] closely.” (This 4. The “translation fallacy” is well-known, but field linguists in
can refer to one woman named “Báigipóhoaá” or particular must be ever-vigilant not to be confused by it. Bruner,
Brockmeier, and Harré (2001:39) describe it as the supposition that
several.) there is only one human reality to which all “narratives”—be they
fiction or linguistic theories, say—must in effect conform.
This feature of Pirahã is itself very rare (see Corbett Throughout this paper I will urge the reader to be on guard against
2000:50). There may be no other language that lacks the this—the mistake of concluding that language X shares a category
grammatical category of number. with language Y if the categories overlap in reference.

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624 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

9. ti ’apaı́ káobı́i ’ahaigı́ “All the people went to swim/went swimming/are

I head fall same generation swimming/bathing, etc.”
hi tı́ohió’ı́o/gaaba káobı́i
he towards me/there stay fall
“I was born first then my sibling was born.” (lit. 11. ti ’ogi -’áaga
“I head fall sibling to me/there at fall.”) I big -be (permanence)
-ó ’ı́tii’isi ’ogi
The expressions tı́ohió’ı́o and gaaba here are inter- -direction fish big
changeable in most contexts. They refer both to inter- -ó ’i kohoai-baaı́,
mediate points in a succession of participants, events, -direction she eat -intensive
etc., or to the final position. But the word “head” does koga hói hi
not really mean “first,” not if we assume that “first” nevertheless small amount intensive
derives its meaning partially in opposition to “second,” hi -i kohoi
“third,” etc., but overlaps with “first” in referring to intensive -be eat
something at the beginning of a spatial or temporal -hiaba
sequence.5 -not
The Pirahã language has no words for individual fin- “We ate most of the fish.” (lit. “My bigness ate
gers (e.g., “ring finger,” “index finger,” “thumb,” etc.). [at] a bigness of fish, nevertheless there was a
Pirahã occasionally refer to their fingers collectively as smallness we did not eat.”)
“hand sticks,” but only when asked by an insistent lin-
guist. By the same reasoning, there is no word for “last.” The following is the closest I have ever been able to get
Moreover, they tend not to point with individual fingers, to a sentence that would substitute for a quantifier like
at least when talking to me. Commonly, if they use any “each,” as in “Each man went to the field.”
part of their arms for pointing, they tend to extend a flat 12. ’igihı́ hi ’ogiáagaó ’oga
hand turned sideways or an open palm facing up or down. man he bigness field
More often, they point, as is common around the world, hápiı́; ’aikáibaı́si, ’ahoáápati pı́o,
with their lower lip or jaw or a motion of the head. When went name, name also,
discussing a large quantity/number of objects, they do tı́igi hi pı́o, ’ogiáagaó
not make tallying motions on individual appendages. If name he also bigness
they use gestures, they hold the flat hand out, palm “The men all went to the field, ’aikáibaı́si, ’ahoáá-
down, varying the distance between hand and ground to pati, tı́igi all went.”
indicate the size of the “pile” or amount under discus-
sion. However, a seated Pirahã man or woman (though 13. gáta -hai hói hi -i
women rarely do this) will occasionally extend both feet can -foreign object small intensive -be
and hands, with toes and fingers also extended, to in- ’aba -’á -ı́gi -o
dicate a large number of individual items (they would remain -temporary -associative -location
do this in my experience not for a nonindividuated quan- ’ao -aagá ’agaoa ko -ó
tity such as manioc flour but rather for bags of manioc possession -be (temporary) canoe gut -direction
flour, etc.). Other than these gestures, there is no use of “There were [a] few cans in the foreigner’s canoe.”
body parts, objects, or anything to indicate a concept of (lit. “Smallness of cans remaining associated was
“tallying.” in the gut of the canoe.”) (’aba’áı́gio can often be
There are no quantifier terms like “all,” “each,” “ev- translated as “only,” but the full morphological
ery,” “most,” and “few” in Pirahã. There are also no breakdown shows that it is not really equivalent in
“WH (information question)-quantifiers” per se.6 The meaning to “only,” nor does it share the full range
following examples show the closest expressions Pirahã of meanings of “only.”)
can muster to these quantifiers:
There are, however, two words, usually occurring in
10. hiaitı́ihı́ hi ’ogi -’áaga reference to an amount eaten or desired, báaiso ‘whole’
Pirahã people he big -be (permanence) and gı́iái ‘part’, which by their closest translation equiv-
-ó pi -ó kaobı́i alents might seem to be quantifiers:
-direction water -direction entered 14. a. tı́obáhai hi bá -a
child he touch -causative
5. Part of the conclusion of this paper, agreeing with Gordon (2004),
is that much of Pirahã is largely incommensurate with English and
-i -so kohoai
therefore translation is simply a poor approximation of Pirahã in- -connective -nominalizer eat
tentions and meaning, but we do as well as we can do. -sóog -ab -agaı́
6. One reviewer has suggested that these Pirahã words are quantifier -desiderative -stay -thus
words but have different truth conditions from their English coun-
terparts. But having different truth conditions simply means having
“The child wanted/s to eat the whole thing.” (lit.
different meanings in this context, and therefore if they have dif- “Child muchness/fullness eat is desiring.”)
ferent truth conditions then they are different words. b. tı́obáhai hi gı́i -ái

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 625

child he that -there Sentences like this one cannot be uttered acceptably in
kohoai -sóog -ab -agaı́ the absence of a particular pair of animals or instructions
eat -desiderative -stay -thus about a specific animal to a specific hunter. In other
“The child wanted/s to eat a piece of the thing.” words, when such sentences are used, they are describing
(lit. “Child that there eat is desiring.”) specific experiences, not generalizing across experiences.
It is of course more difficult to say that something does
Here báaiso and gı́iái are used as nouns, but they can
not exist than to show that it does exist, but facts like
also appear as postnominal modifiers:
those discussed here, in the context of my nearly three
15. a. tiobáhai hi poogaı́hiaı́ báaiso decades of regular research on Pirahã, lead me to the
child he banana whole conclusion that there is no strong evidence for the ex-
kohoai -sóog -ab -agaı́ istence of quantifiers in Pirahã.
eat -desiderative -stay -thus Given the lack of number distinctions, any nominal
“The child wanted/s to eat the whole banana.” is ambiguous between singular, plural, and generic in-
(lit. “Child banana muchness/fullness eat is terpretation. This can lead to interpretations which seem
desiring.”) quantificational:
b. tı́obáhai hi poogaı́hiaı́ gı́iái
child he banana piece 18. tı́ ’iı́bisi hi baiai -hiaba
kohoai -sóog -ab -agaı́ I blood-one he fear -negative
eat -desiderative -stay -thus “I am not afraid of beings with blood.”
”The child wanted/s to eat part of the banana.”
(lit. “Child banana piece eat is desiring.”) 19. kaoáı́bogi hi sabı́ ’áagahá
evil spirit he mean is (permanent)
Aside from their literal meanings, there are important “Evil spirits are mean.”
reasons for not interpreting these two words as quanti-
fiers. First, their truth conditions are not equivalent to On the surface it looks as if these were quantificational
those of real quantifiers. In the following examples some- phrases. They are of course ambiguous between singular
one has just killed an anaconda and upon seeing it, utters reading (e.g., “I am not afraid of that being with blood”)
16a. Someone takes a piece of it, and after the purchase and plural readings (“Those evil spirits are mean”) in
of the remainder the content of 16a is reaffirmed as 16b: addition to the generic, more quantificational readings
given here. Although there is no word “all” in Pirahã, it
could be countered that perhaps it is the construction
16. a. ’áoói hi paóhoa’ai ’isoı́ itself that produces the universal quantifier reading. Su-
foreigner he anaconda skin perficially this is appealing, but I think that it is another
báaiso ’oaboi -haı́ manifestation of the translation fallacy. Even though
“whole” buy -relative certainty there is a certain “quantificational smell” here, the truth
“The foreigner will likely buy the entire ana-
conditions are not the same for generics as for quanti-
conda skin.”
ficational readings (see, e.g., Krifka et al. 1995). In fact,
b. ’aió hi báaiso ’oaob
I and others who have visited the Pirahã have misun-
affirmative he “whole” buy
derstood statements like these and/or their literal trans-
-áhá hi ’ogió
lations because we do translate them into Western lan-
-complete certainty he bigness
guages as generic, universal quantification. These never
’oaob -áhá
mean that all beings with blood, for example, fail to in-
buy -complete certainty
spire fear. That there are always exceptions is understood
“Yes, he bought the whole thing.”
by the utterer and the hearer. It seems, though, that such
In the English equivalent, where the same context is sets conform to the postulate of cultural constraint on
assumed, when the statement “He will likely buy the grammar and living because they are bounded by im-
whole anaconda skin” is followed by the removal of a mediate experience (e.g., “evil spirits I know about”) and
piece in full view of interlocutors, it would simply be thus are not fully intensional. Rather, each member of
dishonest and a violation of the meaning of “whole” to the set has to be inspected to see whether it is an evil
say, “He bought the whole anaconda skin,” but this is spirit or being with blood and, if so, whether it is like
not the case in Pirahã. other such beings.
Next, there is no truly quantificational-abstraction us- In 1980, at the Pirahã’s urging, my wife and I began a
age of báaiso ‘whole’: series of evening classes in counting and literacy. My
entire family participated, with my three children (9, 6,
17. ∗Ti ’ı́si báaiso ’ogabagai
and 3 at that time) sitting with Pirahã men and women
I animal “whole” want,
and working with them. Each evening for eight months
gı́iái ’ogi -hiaba
my wife would try to teach Pirahã men and women to
piece want -negative
count to ten in Portuguese. They told us that they
“I prefer whole animals to portions of animals.” (lit.
wanted to learn this because they knew that they did
“I desire [a] whole animal[s], not piece[s].”)
not understand nonbarter economic relations and

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626 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

wanted to be able to tell whether they were being relationship” there is no evidence whatsoever of quan-
cheated. After eight months of daily efforts, without ever tification or counting or learning of the basis of trade
needing to call them to come for class (all meetings were values. Pirahã living near the Trans-Amazon Highway
started by them with much enthusiasm), the people con- are far from Brazil nut groves, so they trade fish to passing
cluded that they could not learn this material, and clas- truck drivers and some settlers. In these cases they tend
ses were abandoned. Not one learned to count to ten, to be much more aggressive because they know that they
and not one learned to add 3 ⫹ 1 or even 1 ⫹ 1 (if regularly are feared, and if they are not satisfied with the exchange
responding “2” to the latter is evidence of learning)— (and they never are in this situation, in my experience)
only occasionally would some get the right answer. This they simply return at night to steal produce from the
seemed random to us, as indeed similar experiences were settler’s fields or any possessions not locked away.
shown to be random in Gordon’s (2004) research. It should be underscored here that the Pirahã ulti-
Riverboats come regularly to the Pirahã villages during mately not only do not value Portuguese (or American)
the Brazil nut season. This contact has probably been knowledge but oppose its coming into their lives. They
going on for more than 200 years. Pirahã men collect ask questions about outside cultures largely for the en-
Brazil nuts and store them around their village for trade. tertainment value of the answers. If one tries to suggest
They know all the traders by name and consider some (as we originally did, in a math class, for example) that
more honest than others (their judgments in this regard there is a preferred response to a specific question, they
always agreeing with judgments I formed later on my will likely change the subject and/or show irritation.
own) on the basis of the quantity of items they receive They will “write stories,” just random marks, on paper
for the nuts they trade. A Pirahã man will present what- I give them and then “read” the stories back to me—
ever it is that he has to “sell,” whether Brazil nuts, raw telling me something random about their day, etc. They
rubber, sorva, or wood, to the owner of the riverboat. may even make marks on paper and say random Por-
The Brazilian will ask in Portuguese, “What do you tuguese numbers while holding the paper for me to see.
want, my son?” The Pirahã responds in Portuguese, They do not understand at all that such symbols should
be precise (for examples, when I ask them to draw a
“Only Father [i.e., the riverboat owner] knows.” The Pir-
symbol twice, it is never replicated) and consider their
ahã call all riverboat owners Papai, “Father,” when di-
“writing” exactly the same as the marks that I make. In
rectly addressing them but use Pirahã names for them
literacy classes, we were never able to train Pirahã even
(which are usually pejorative, e.g., “No Balls”) when dis-
to draw a straight line without serious “coaching,” and
cussing them.7 It is not clear that the Pirahã understand
they were never able to repeat the feat in subsequent
even most of what they are saying in such situations.
trials without more coaching (partially because they saw
None of them seems to understand that this exchange
the entire process as fun and enjoyed the interaction but
involves relative prestige. Their Portuguese is extremely
also because the concept of a “correct” way to draw was
poor, again, but they can function in these severely cir- profoundly foreign).9
cumscribed situations. They will point at goods on the Finally, I agree that Pirahã and English are incom-
boat until the owner says that they have been paid in mensurate in several ways and that numbers and count-
full.8 They will remember the items they received (but ing are one very obvious manifestation of this incom-
not exact quantities) and tell me and other Pirahã what mensurability, but it is not clear that linguistic
transpired, looking for confirmation that they got a good determinism provides the explanation we need. The rea-
deal. There is little connection, however, between the son is that the absence of counting is simply one un-
amount they bring to trade and the amount they ask for. expected absence in Pirahã language and culture. There
For example, someone can ask for an entire roll of hard are various others, partially enumerated above, that,
tobacco in exchange for a small sack of nuts or a small when considered together, appear to result from a higher-
piece of tobacco for a large sack. Whiskey is what the level cultural constraint or constraints. The constraint(s)
Pirahã men prefer to trade for, and they will take any must be cultural, it seems to me, because, while there
amount in exchange for almost anything. For a large does not seem to be any linguistic or cognitive com-
quantity (but usually after they are drunk) they will also monality between the items, there is a cultural value
“rent” their wives or daughters to the riverboat owner that they share, namely, the value of referring only to
and crew (though, whatever transpires, the riverboat immediate experience. If we accept this as a strong cul-
owner should not leave with any women). In this “trade
9. The end of the literacy classes, begun at the Pirahã’s request (and
7. Traders enjoy telling me how the Pirahã call them Papai and separate from the math classes already described), was as follows.
love them like a father, but the Pirahã understand it quite differ- After many classes, the Pirahã (most of the village we were living
ently. For one thing, in Pirahã “Father” can be used in reference to in, about 30 people) read together, out loud, the word bigı́ ‘ground/
someone one is dependent on, as in this case, where there is de- sky’. They immediately all laughed. I asked what was so funny.
pendency for trade items. Ultimately, to the Pirahã, a foreigner with They answered that what they had just said sounded like their word
goods seems to be seen as something like a fruit tree in the forest. for ‘sky’. I said that indeed it did because it was their word. They
One needs to know the best way to get the fruit from it without reacted by saying that if that is what we were trying to teach them,
hurting oneself. There is no question of pride or prestige involved. they wanted us to stop: “We don’t write our language.” The decision
8. This is the patron-client system common in Latin America. The was based on a rejection of foreign knowledge; their motivation for
trader always tells the Pirahã that they have overspent, with the attending the literacy classes turned out to be, according to them,
result that they are constantly indebted to him. that it was fun to be together and I made popcorn.

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 627

tural constraint in Pirahã, then the list of items is greatly forms. Three are not even words, as is shown by the
reduced because each involves quantification, which en- following morphological divisions and glosses:11
tails abstract generalizations that range in principle be-
20. bii -o3pai2 ai3
yond immediate experience, rather than qualification, blood -dirty/opaque be/do
which entails judgments about immediate experience.10 “Blood is dirty.”

Color Terms 21. k -o3bi ai3

object -see be/do
According to the entry for Pirahã in Kay et al. (n.d.), based “It sees.”
on work by Steve Sheldon,
Múra-Pirahã presents a stable stage IIIG/Bu system. 22. bi3i1 -sai3
All four terms for black, white, red/yellow, and blood -nominalizer
green/blue are used by all speakers with clearly de- “bloodlike”
fined ranges and very high consensus (100% maxi-
mum in all cases) in the term maps. There is also
considerable uniformity in the individual naming ar- 23. a3hoa3s aa3ga1
rays. No other terms were recorded in the naming immature be:temporary
task. “temporarily being immature”
The term for black, bio3pai2ai3 [Kay et al.’s foot-
There are no color terms in Pirahã. This conclusion is
note reads “The raised numerals following each syl-
not intended as an indictment of Sheldon’s claims. When
lable indicate tone”] extends strongly into brown one is armed with a set of categories (e.g., the Berlin and
and more weakly into purple, which may represent Kay [1969] model for color terms) and no other, it is
the vestiges of an earlier black/green/blue range for understandable that one finds what one can talk about—
this term. The white term bio3pai2ai3 [the term that is, that a degree of linguistic relativity colors the
meant is ko3biai3] and red/yellow term bi3i1sai3 (the research of linguists. Also, because linguistics research
latter focused in red and extended into purple) are of among the Pirahã is monolingual, there is no way to get
interest in that they show signs of coextension in translations of any precision whatsoever for color terms,
yellow, both in the aggregate naming arrays and in number words, verb suffixes, etc. All meaning has to be
their ranges on the term maps. While focal yellow worked out by correlating context with utterance (in the
(C9) is named bi3i1sai3 in the aggregates, both terms most extreme form of Quine’s [1960] gavagai-confront-
include it in their ranges, as seen in the term maps. ing field researcher) and by simply learning enough of
Individual speakers vary in preference between these the culture and language oneself to develop incipient
two terms for inclusion of yellow. Grue is named intuitions that guide further testing and reasoning.12
a3hoa3saa3ga1. Its term map indicates a focus in There is, however, a possible objection to the conclu-
green, and is extended into yellow by some speakers. sion that there are no color terms in Pirahã. Paul Kay
(personal communication) suggests that if the Pirahã use
The proposed Pirahã color terms of Sheldon are given these phrases regularly in normal speech to describe ex-
in table 1. In fact, these are not morphologically simple
11. Sheldon analyzes Pirahã as having three underlying tones. I have
argued elsewhere (Everett 1979) that it should be analyzed as having
10. Now, of course, human cognition must be able to range beyond only two tones, and I follow this analysis throughout the paper
immediate experience, and therefore my claim is not that the Pirahã except for this section. For these examples, taken from Sheldon’s
cannot do this. I have no basis for such a claim (though experiments work, I use his tones.
to test this ability should be conducted). My claim is rather that 12. This of course means that what I say about Pirahã semantics
they do not express quantification in nearly as wide a range of is largely unreplicable unless the “replication” linguist learns to
lexical or syntactic devices as in other languages. speak the language.

table 1
World Color Survey Chart of Pirahã Color Terms

Symbol Term Gloss Users Basic Color Term

# bio3pai2ai3 black (extended) 25 ⫹

– ko3biai3 white (extended) 25 ⫹
⫹ bi3i1sai3 red/yellow 25 ⫹
o a3hoa3saa3ga1 green/blue (green- 25 ⫹
focused)

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628 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

actly these colors and the related color “space,” then the in almost every line of the text. Only when the panther
phrases themselves count as color terms. This is a dif- dies is it replaced completely by the “pronoun” s-/is-,
ferent concept of color term from the one I had in mind which is simply the first syllable (s- is how it comes out
(namely, morphologically simple terms for colors), but in rapid speech, like English “snot either” for “It is not
even if we grant Kay’s point mine remains the same: not either”) of the word ’ı́si ’animal/meat’, which is what it
only are these phrases not simple color words but there has become after death. This is strange in light of most
is no use of color quantification in Pirahã (e.g., “I like work (e.g., Givon 1983) on topic continuity in discourse,
red” or “I like red things.” At the very least, this absence and it is the common, perhaps exclusive pattern of pro-
of morphologically simple color words and of quantifi- noun-versus-proper-noun occurrence in Pirahã dis-
cation (as in generalized quantifier theory, where noun course. The Pirahã prefer not to use a pronoun to refer
phrases may be used to denote sets of properties) using
to an entity, since this is using something ambiguous or
color indicates that Pirahã color description is a very
vague in place of a proper name. Pronouns are used rel-
different kind of thing from what our experience with
atively little for marking the activities of discourse par-
other languages would lead us to expect.
There have been no controlled experiments to show ticipants. They are also not used as variables bound by
whether the Pirahã distinguish colors as do speakers of quantifiers. There is, for example, no Pirahã equivalent
languages with color terms. However, I have asked them to a “donkey sentence” (“Everyone who owns a donkey
about different colors on many occasions, and I have not beats it”). This reduced role for pronouns is striking. Not
noticed any inability to offer distinct descriptive phrases only does it follow from the cultural constraint on gram-
for new colors. Therefore, I expect that, in contrast to mar but the absence of pronouns prior to their borrowing
the situation with numbers, the Pirahã would show good seems likely. What “pronouns” in Pirahã are mainly used
ability to distinguish colors under controlled circum- for is verb agreement (Everett 1987).
stances. This is likely because color is different from In spite of my claim that variables play no active role
number cognitively and culturally. But since neither in quantification or the grammar of pronominals, one
color nor number terms are found in Pirahã, it is rea- reader has suggested that verbs and nouns are variables
sonable to ask what color terms have in common with because they are place-holders for large sets of objects.
numbers. Both are used to quantify beyond immediate, In fact, although this proposal might work for other lan-
spatio-temporally bound experience. If one has a concept guages, it does not work for Pirahã. First, there are only
of “red” as opposed to immediate, nonlexicalized de- 90 verb roots in the Pirahã lexicon. In other words, verbs
scriptions, one can talk about “red things” as an abstract are a closed lexical class, and this means that, rather than
category (e.g., “Don’t eat red things in the jungle” [good learn them as variables, the Pirahã can learn them as
advice]). But Pirahã refer to plants not by generic names constants, one by one. Moreover, the combination of
but by species names, and they do not talk about colors
verbs is largely constrained by culture. Further, it is un-
except as describing specific objects in their own ex-
necessary to consider nouns variables, since there is no
perience.
nominal morphology and since the appearance of nouns
in the syntax can be determined semantically rather than
morphologically, meaning that the behavior of nouns
Pronouns
could be determined by their individual meanings rather
Pirahã has the simplest pronoun inventory known. than their role as variables. Thus both nouns and verbs
Moreover, it appears that all its pronouns were borrowed behave more like constants than variables in Pirahã.
recently from a Tupi-Guarani language, either the Lingua
Geral or Kawahiv (Tenharim or Parintintin) (see also Ni-
muendajú 1925). [The argument for borrowing may be
found in the electronic edition of this issue on the jour- Lack of Embedding
nal’s web page.] Somehow the grammar seems to have
gotten by without them,13 but even their current use One more unusual feature of Pirahã, perhaps the strang-
shows that they do not have the full range of uses nor- est of all, is the absence of clear evidence for embedding.
mally associated with pronouns in other languages. For Indeed, the evidence suggests that Pirahã lacks embed-
example, Pirahã pronouns function very differently in ding altogether. Let us begin by considering how the
discourse from most pronouns. In a narrative about the function of clausal complements is expressed in Pirahã
killing of a panther, the word for “panther” is repeated
without embedding. English expresses the content of
verbs such as “to say,” “to think,” and “to want” as
13. It is possible that tones were used rather than free-form pro-
nouns, though the only use of tones currently on pronouns is to clausal complements (here the use of a subscript s labels
distinguish “ergative” from “absolutive” in the first person (ti p the embedded clauses as theory-neutral): “I said that
absolutive; tı́ p ergative). One reader of this paper found it “in- [sJohn will be here],” “I want [syou to come],” “I think
conceivable” that there would have been no first-versus-second- [sit’s important].” In Pirahã the contents of such verbs,
person distinction in the language at any point in its history. In
fact, however, Wari (Everett n.d.) is a language that currently lacks to the degree that equivalent verbs exist at all, are ex-
any first-versus-second-person distinction. pressed without embedding:

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 629

24. ti gái -sai kó’oı́ hi kaháp -iı́ 27. ∗hi gó ’igi -ai ’ob -áa’áı́ kai -sai
I say -nominative name he leave -intention “What thing [does he] know well to make?” (lit.
“I said that Kó’oı́ intends to leave.” (lit. “My saying “What associated thing he knows well to make/
Kó’oı́ intend-leaves.”) making?”)

The verb “to say” (gái) in Pirahã is always nominal- In a question about 25, the order of the clauses must
ized. It takes no inflection at all. The simplest translation be that in 26. This follows if there is no embedding,
of it is as a possessive noun phrase “my saying,” with because the interrogative word must always be initial in
the following clause interpreted as a type of comment. the phrase and because the appearance of the entire
The “complement clause” is thus a juxtaposed clause clause/phrase at the front of the construction means that
interpreted as the content of what was said but not ob- the question of extraction from within an embedded or
viously involving embedding. Pirahã has no verb “to other phrase does not arise. We can, indeed should, in-
think,” using instead (as do many other Amazonian lan- terpret 26 as the questioning of a constituent of the ini-
guages [see Everett 2004]) the verb “to say” to express tial clause “arrow-making” and not of an embedded con-
intentional contents. Therefore “John thinks that . . .” stituent of the clause “he knows x well.”
would be expressed in Pirahã as “John’s saying that. . . .” Some readers may still find it difficult to accept the
English complement clauses of other types are handled idea of analyzing nominalized clauses of the type just
similarly in Pirahã, by nominalizing one of the clauses: mentioned apart from embedding because the two are so
closely associated in many languages (see Koptjevskaja
Tamm 1993). Nominalization is, however, neither a nec-
25. a. hi ob -áa’áı́ kahai kai -sai essary nor a sufficient condition for embedding, and an
he see -attractive arrow make -nominative embedding analysis fails to account for multiple embed-
b. kahaı́ kai -sai hi dings (why can’t multiple nominalized or other types of
arrow make -nominative he subordination occur in any sentence?) and for the ex-
ob -áa’áı́ traction and word-order facts. At the same time, a close
see -attractive semantic unit is formed by certain juxtaposed clauses,
c. ∗hi kahaı́ kai -sai and the nominalization is accounted for by the principle
he arrow make -nominative of immediacy of information encoding, which is stated
ob -áa’áı́ in terms of utterances rather than clauses.
see attractive Other “subordinate” clauses similarly show no evi-
“He knows how to make arrows well.” (lit. “He dence of embedding:
sees attractively arrow-making.”) 28. ti kobai -baı́ ’áoói hi
I see -intensive foreigner he
There are two plausible analyses for this construction.
’ı́kao -ap -áp -iig -á
The first is that there is embedding, with the clause/verb
mouth -pull -up -continuative -declarative
phrase “arrow make” nominalized and inserted in direct-
“I really watch[ed] the foreigner fishing [with line
object position of the “matrix” verb “to see/know well.”
and hook].” (lit. “I watch the foreigner intently.
The second is that this construction is the paratactic
He was pulling [fish] out by [their] mouths.”)
conjoining of the noun phrase “arrow-making” and the
clause “he sees well.” The latter analysis seems to fit
29. ∗hi gó ’igı́
the general grammar of Pirahã better. This is because as
he information question associate
an object the phrase “arrow-making” should appear be-
-ai hi ’ı́kaoapápiigá hi
fore the verb, whereas here it follows it. And, whereas
-do/be he fish he
normally there is optional clitic agreement available
kobai -baı́ ’áoói
with any direct object, there is never any clitic agreement
see -intensive foreigner
with such “object complement clauses” in Pirahã (Ev- “What did he pull out by the mouth you watched
erett 1988). Further, although the order of “complement” intently?”
and “matrix” clauses can be reversed, the “embedded”
clause can never appear in direct-object position.
30. hi gó ’igı́
Further evidence of the analysis is the corresponding
he information question associate
interrogative form:
-ai hi kobai -baı́
26. hi gó ’igı́ -ai -do/be he see -intensive
he information question associate -do/be ’áoói
kai -sai hi ’ob -áa’áı́ foreigner
make -nominative he see -attractive “What did he see the foreigner do?/Why did he
“What [thing/kind of] making [does he] know watch the foreigner?”
well?” (lit. “He what associated making sees Example 29 is ungrammatical because there is no re-
well?”) lation that can be understood to obtain between the two
clauses. It is asking a question about one clause and mak-

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630 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

ing a statement with the other. Since they are not in the Let us now consider two other potential cases of em-
same sentence, however, they just come across as un- bedding in Pirahã, possession and modification:
related, at least to judge by the looks of incomprehension
35. ∗kó’oı́ hoagı́ kai gáihiı́ ’ı́ga
and lack of interpretation that native speakers face in
such elicited constructions. In contrast, 30 is acceptable name son daughter that true
because it is simply asking about what someone “That is Kó’oı́ ‘s son’s daughter.”
watched; the answer could be a clause or a noun phrase.
Now consider how temporal clauses are handled: 36. ∗kaóoı́ ’igı́ai hoagi kai gáihiı́ ’ı́ga
who son daughter that true
31. kohoai -kabáob -áo ti “Whose son’s daughter is that?”
eat -finish -temporal I
gı́ ’ahoai -soog Neither the declarative (35) nor the interrogative (36)
you speak -desiderative form of recursive possession is acceptable. No more than
-abagaı́ one possessor per noun phrase is ever allowed. Removing
-frustrated initiation one of the possessors in either sentence makes it gram-
“When [I] finish eating, I want to speak to you.” matical. A cultural observation here is, I believe, im-
(lit. “When eating finishes, I speak-almost want.”) portant for understanding this restriction. Every Pirahã
knows every other Pirahã, and they add the knowledge
There is almost always a detectable pause between the of newborns very quickly. Therefore one level of pos-
temporal clause and the “main clause.” Such clauses sessor is all that is ever needed. If further identification
may look embedded from the English translation, but I is called for, say, in the case of a foreign family, then an
see no evidence for such an analysis. Perhaps a better extra phrase is juxtaposed:
translation would be “I finish eating, I speak to you.”
The similar conditional that follows uses nominaliza- 37. ’ı́saabi kai gáihiı́ ’ı́ga
tion: name daughter that true
kó’oı́ hoagı́ ’aisigı́ -aı́
32. pii -boi -sai ti name son the same -be
water vertically move -nominalizer I “That is ’ı́saabi ‘s daughter. Kó’oı́’s son being the
kahapi -hiab -a same.”
go -negative -declarative
“If it rains, I will not go.” (lit. “Raining I go not.”) Here the juxtaposition makes it clear that ’ı́saabi is
Kó’oı́’s son.
Both 31 and 32 are best analyzed as simple juxtapo- Very rarely, one encounters multiple modification in
sition of two clauses. There is a clear semantic depen- natural discourse and elicited material. A typical ex-
dency, but this does not necessarily translate into a syn- ample is as follows:
tactic relation. The only ways I know to ask questions
about them are “When will you want to speak to me?” 38. gahióo ’ogiı́ biı́sai hoı́
and “Why won’t you go?” airplane big red two
Pirahã has no relative clauses proper. However, it does -hio ’ao -’aagá
have a co-relative clause (Everett 1986, 1992): there possess -be
“There are two big red airplanes.”
33. ti baósa -ápisı́ ’ogabagaı́. Chico
I cloth -arm want. name There seems no need to analyze this as embedding, how-
hi goó bag -áoba ever. It is merely, as in previous cases, juxtaposition,
he what sell -completive stringing out a small number of adjectives in a specified
order (e.g., size ⫹ color ⫹ quantity). There is no ambig-
Here there is a full sentence pause between the verb uous modification resulting from multiple “attachment”
’ogabagaı́ ‘want’ and the next clause. The two sentences possibilities as in English “old men and women.” The
are connected contextually, but this is not embedding. ambiguity here is usually understood as the result of
Each is an independent, well-formed sentence. The sec- attaching “old” to either the noun phrase containing
ond sentence, on its own, would be a question, “What “men and women” or the lower noun phrase containing
did Chico sell?” In this context, however, it is the co- only “men.” Since there is no way for “old” to be at-
relative. tached uniquely to “women,” the third ambiguity (in
Finally, “want”-like embeddings are handled in Pirahã
which only women would be old) is ruled out. However,
by a desiderative suffix on the verb, with no evidence of
Pirahã never allows such conjunction of noun phrases
biclausality:
with modifiers. Rather, the equivalent in Pirahã would
34. ’ipóihiı́ ’ı́ gı́ kobai -soog be:
woman she you see -want
39. ’ogi -áag -aó toı́o
-abagaı́
big -be -thus old
-frustrated initiation
-’aagá ’igihı́ ’ipóihiı́ pı́aii
“The woman wants to see you.”
-be man woman also

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 631

“Everyone (lit. “people bigness”) is old. Men and water’ (lit. ‘water skinny temporal’), piibigaı́so ‘high wa-
women too.” ter’ (lit. ‘water thick temporal’), kahai’aı́i ’ogiı́so ‘full
moon’ (lit. ‘moon big temporal’), hisó ‘during the day’
Once again, 39 involves juxtaposition. This is further
(lit. ‘in sun’), hisóogiái ‘noon’ (lit. ‘in sun big be’), hibi-
supported by the ability to repeat the modifier “old” in
gı́bagá’áiso ‘sunset/sunrise’ (lit. ‘he touch comes be tem-
the following construction:
poral’), ’ahoakohoaihio ‘early morning, before sunrise’
40. ’ogiáagaó toı́o’aagá ’igihı́ toı́o’aagá (lit. ‘at fire inside eat go’).
big old man old Absolute tenses are defined relative to the moment of
’ipóihiı́ toı́o’aagá pı́aii speech, which is represented as “S” in the Hornstein-
woman old also Reichenbach system (see also Comrie 1985). The event
“Everyone (lit. “people bigness”) is old. Men and or state itself is shown as “E.” Relative tenses are rep-
women too.” resented by the linear arrangment of S and E with respect
to the point of R(eference) for E. Thus, for example, the
There is likewise no evidence for embedding in Pirahã tenses of English can be represented in this system as
morphological structure. Although the complexity of the follows (where a comma p simultaneous and __ p pre-
verb is very high, with perhaps more than 16 suffix clas- cedes [see Hornstein 1990 and Everett 1993 for details]):
ses, there is nothing about its semantic composition, S, R, E p present tense; S__R, E p future tense; E, R__S
stress, or morphological attachment that requires re- p past tense; E__R__S p past perfect; S__E__R p future
course to the notion of embedding to account for Pirahã perfect; E__S, R p present perfect.
morphology. The system, however complex, can be ac- To account for Pirahã’s lack of the perfect, I have sug-
counted for by a “position class” analysis along the lines gested that [R] is parameterized, with [-R] as the default
of Everett (1986), in which individual morphemes occupy value. Children would set it at [⫹R] just in case they
linearly arranged, semantically distinguished slots. heard a perfect-tense utterance or, perhaps, a perfect-
If indeed there is no embedding in Pirahã, how might tense interpretation. I have also pointed to the connec-
this lack be related to cultural constraint? Embedding tion between the absence of an R-point in the semantics
increases information flow beyond the threshold of the of Pirahã tense system and the lack of concern with
principle of immediacy of information encoding. Al- quantifying time in Pirahã culture. I have argued that
though Pirahã most certainly has the communicative formal grammars require that any noncoincidental con-
resources to express clauses that in other languages are nection in this regard be Whorfian; language must influ-
embedded, there is no convincing evidence that Pirahã ence culture, since otherwise children would have to
in fact has embedding, and, as we have seen, positing it learn their culture in order to learn their grammar, an
would complicate our understanding of question for- order of acquisition proscribed in Chomskyan models.
mation. This would follow from the principle of im- However, in the context of the present exploration of
mediacy of information encoding, which I take to be the culture-grammar interactions in Pirahã, it is possible to
iconic principle constraining the grammar’s conformity situate the semantics of Pirahã tense more perspica-
to cultural constraint.14 ciously by seeing the absence of precise temporal refer-
ence and relative tenses as one further example of the
cultural constraint on grammar and living. This would
Tense follow because precise temporal reference and relative
tenses quantify and make reference to events outside of
I have argued elsewhere (1993) that Pirahã has no perfect immediate experience and cannot, as can all Pirahã time
tense and have provided a means for accounting for this words, be binarily classified as “in experience” and “out
fact formally within the neo-Reichenbachian tense of experience.”
model of Hornstein (1990). This is an argument about When the Pirahã hear a boat coming, they will line up
the semantics of Pirahã tense, not merely the morpho- on the riverbank and wait for it to come into sight. They
syntax of tense representation. In other words, the claim will say, “The boat ’ibipı́o (‘arrived’).” They will watch
is that there is no way to get a perfect tense meaning in a boat disappear around the corner and say, “The boat
Pirahã, not merely an absence of a formal marker for it. ’ibipı́o (‘left’).” When a match is lit, they say that the
Pirahã has two tenselike morphemes, -a ‘remote’ and match ’ibipı́ai (where -ai is the verb form and -o the
-i ‘proximate’. These are used for either past or present incorporated form).15 They will repeat the same expres-
events and serve primarily to mark whether an event is sion when the match goes out. They especially use this
in the immediate control or experience of the speaker for a flickering match and love to watch one, saying
(“proximate”) or not (“remote”). “Keep on ’ibipı́ai.” After discussions and checking of
In fact, Pirahã has very few words for time. The com- many examples of this, it became clearer that the Pirahã
plete list is as follows: ’ahoapió ‘another day’ (lit. ‘other
at fire’), pi’ı́ ‘now’, so’óá ‘already’ (lit. ‘time-wear’), hoa 15. Verbal events are also culturally restricted in Pirahã, but verbal
‘day’ (lit. ‘fire’), ahoái ‘night’ (lit. ‘be at fire’), piiáiso ‘low “incorporation” (the stringing together of several verb roots [Everett
1986: section 18] to form another verb), is quite common. For “ar-
rival” and some other events, there are always multiple verb roots
14. Peter Culicover (personal communication) suggests that Pir- incorporated. For “match flicker,” however, there is only the single
ahã’s lack of embedding is a kind of linguistic “fossil.” verb ’ibipiai.

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632 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

are talking about liminality—situations in which an riage is relatively unconstrained. Pirahã can marry close
item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experi- relatives. I have seen adults I knew to share a biological
ence. This concept is found throughout Pirahã culture. parent marry and have been told that this is not rare,
Pirahã’s excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river but I have never seen a marriage between full biological
bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as traveling siblings.
into another dimension. It is interesting, in light of the This raises the additional question of how the Pirahã
postulated cultural constraint on grammar, that there is distinguish between just anyone at their generation and
an important Pirahã term and cultural value for crossing biological siblings, which they seem to do pretty well
the border between experience and nonexperience. despite the fact that children not uncommonly switch
families and are occasionally (especially orphans) raised
by the village. The nominal suffix gı́i ‘real’ or ‘true’ can
Kinship Terms be added to most nouns, including kinship terms: ’áoói
‘foreigner’, ’áoói-gı́i ‘Brazilian’ (lit. ‘real foreigner’—the
ones they knew first), ’ahaigı́ ‘same generation’,
Pirahã’s kinship system may be the simplest yet re-
’ahaigı́–gı́i ‘biological sibling’ (lit. ‘real sibling’).
corded. An exhaustive list of the kinship terms is the
following (unless specifically mentioned, there are no
gender distinctions): ’ahaigı́ ‘ego’s generation’, tiobáhai
‘any generation below ego’, baı́’i ‘any generation above
Absence of Creation Myths and Fiction
ego/someone with power over ego,’16 ’ogiı́ ‘any gener-
ation above ego/someone with power over ego’ (lit. The Pirahã do not create fiction, and they have no cre-
‘big’), ’ibı́gaı́ ‘usually two generations above ego or more ation stories or myths. This contrasts with information
but overlaps with baı́’i and ’igiı́’ (lit. ‘to be thick’), hoagı́ that we have on the related language, Mura. Nimuen-
‘biological son’ (lit. ‘come next to’), hoı́sai ‘biological dajú (1948) is not the only one to have observed that
son’ (lit. ‘going one’),17 kaai ‘biological daughter’ (a the Mura people have a rich set of texts about the past.
house is a kaaiı́i ‘daughter thing’), piihı́ ‘child of at least All of this field research, however, was carried out in
one dead parent/favorite child’.18 Portuguese and is therefore difficult to evaluate. If we
Is it a coincidence—another one—that this kinship had texts in the Mura language, it would be easier in
system is found in Pirahã, given the other facts we have principle to verify (e.g., by grammatical and topical de-
been discussing? Or could it be of a piece with all that vices) the authenticity of the texts or whether they
we have seen, another effect of the cultural constraint might have in fact been borrowed. In any case, it seems
on grammar and living? The latter seems the most eco- unavoidable that Mura, a dialect closely related to Pi-
nomical and satisfying explanation. Kinship terms refer rahã, had texts about the distant past, perhaps fables,
some legends, and other fiction (and, in Portuguese, ac-
only to known relatives; one never refers to relatives
cording to some anthropologists [see Oliveira 1978], it
who died before one was born. During one four-week
still has such texts).19
period in 1995 I worked exclusively on trying to build
I have attempted to discuss cosmology, the origin of
a genealogy for an entire village. I could not find anyone
the universe, etc., with the Pirahã innumerable times.
who could give the names of his/her great-grandparents,
They themselves initiate many of these discussions, so
and very few could remember the names of all four
there is no question of any reluctance to discuss the
grandparents. Most could only remember (or would
“true story” with me as an outsider. In the early days,
only give) the names of one or two grandparents. I was
before I spoke Pirahã, I would occasionally try to use
able to include names back four generations for my
Portuguese to elicit the information. Often this or that
main informant, but that was only because there were
two unusually old Pirahã (both women) in the village
who could remember two grandparents each. The sim- 19. The quality of anthropological research on Pirahã varies. Several
anthropologists (see esp. Gonçalves 1990, 2001; Oliveira 1978; Oliv-
ple fact is that the kinship terms conform exactly to eira and Rodrigues 1977; Roppa 1977) have done a reasonable job
the principle of immediacy of experience. of describing aspects of Pirahã culture, but a previous description
Since kinship and marriage constraints are closely of the kinship system (Oliveira 1978), weakened by the researcher’s
related in most societies, it is worth mentioning the inability to speak the language, contains confusions between cli-
effects of this simple kinship system on Pirahã marriage ticized possessive forms of a particular kinship term and distinct
kinship terms. The longer-term studies of Pirahã cosmology and
relations. Not surprisingly, in light of this system, mar- naming by Gonçalves are the most reliable ever done by an an-
thropologist, but one simply cannot come to the best conclusions
16. Whether this is related to the use of Portuguese Papai ‘father’ about Pirahã meanings working through the medium of the very
in dealing with traders I do not know, though I suspect that it is. poor Portuguese of Pirahã informants. Gonçalves based much of
I am not sure which came first. his research on work with two Pirahã informants whose Portuguese
17. These two terms for “son” appear to be synonyms; I have never was somewhat better than that of most Pirahã because they had
been able to discover any difference between them in texts, direct been taken away from the village as boys and lived for several years
questions, indirect observations, etc., and they seem to be used with with Brazilians along the Madeira River until they were discovered
equal frequency. and restored to their people, but even their Portuguese was insuf-
18. It seems to have both of these meanings simultaneously, though ficient for getting at the meanings of terms as they emerge both
different people use it in different ways, some favoring the former, from the culture and especially from the very complex morpho-
some the latter. logical structure of Pirahã.

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 633

Pirahã informant would tell me (in Portuguese) that rectional reception, rapid fading, interchangeability, total
they had stories like this and would even tell me bits feedback, specialization, semanticity, arbitrariness, dis-
and pieces, which I thought were similar to Christian creteness, displacement, productivity, duality of pattern-
stories or Tupi legends common in that part of Brazil ing, traditional transmission. The three features that
(e.g., the widespread beliefs about river porpoises and stand out in particular here are interchangeability, dis-
dolphins, especially the pink dolphin, emerging from placement, and productivity.
the rivers at night to take on human form and go in To the degree that Pirahã lacks a concept of counting,
search of women to marry, rape, and so on). Indeed, now it is incommensurate in that semantic or cognitive do-
that I speak Pirahã, I know that even among themselves main with languages that have such a concept. I suspect
the Pirahã repeat and embellish these stories. But there that there are other domains of Pirahã in which inter-
are no indigenous creation myths or fiction any longer, changeability is also absent, but in the domain of count-
if indeed they ever existed, and there is not a single ing the lack of interchangeability can be considered es-
story about the ancient past told by any Pirahã other tablished (see Gordon 2004). I submit that the evidence
than bits and pieces of Tupi and Portuguese stories (not is sufficient in this case to conclude that this design
always acknowledged as such). When pressed about cre- feature is not uniformly inviolable.
ation, for example, Pirahã say simply, “Everything is With regard to displacement, I believe that the facts
the same,” meaning that nothing changes, nothing was above show that it is severely restricted in Pirahã as a
created. Their talking about the stories of other cultures cultural principle. Pirahã of course exhibits displacement
can be best understood, it seems to me, as “mention- in that people regularly talk about things that are absent
ing” texts that they have experienced qua texts rather from the context at the time of talking about them, but
than “using” them to discuss or explain anything in this is only one degree of displacement. The inability in
the world around them or the ancient world. They are principle to talk about things removed from personal
like oral-literary theorists in their telling and discus- experience (for example, abstractions of the type repre-
sion of the texts of others. Nimuendajú (1948), though sented by counting, numbers, quantification, multi-
easily collecting myths from the Mura, was unable to generational genealogies, complex kinship, colors, and
collect them from the Pirahã. No one ever refers to a other semantic/cultural domains discussed above) shows
mythical figure, story, or concept in normal conversa- that displacement in Pirahã grammar and language is
tion, and when questioned directly about creation Pi- severely constrained by Pirahã culture.
rahã claim that the way things are is the way they have Productivity is also shown to be severely restricted by
always been. Pirahã culture, since there are things that simply cannot
be talked about, for reasons of form and content, in Pi-
rahã in the current state of its grammar.
Discussion The implications of all this for the enterprise of lin-
guistics are as follows:
We have seen that the gaps observed in Pirahã—the ab- 1. If culture is causally implicated in grammatical
sence of number, numerals, or a concept of counting and forms, then one must learn one’s culture to learn one’s
of terms for quantification, the absence of color terms grammar, but then, contra Chomsky (2002), a grammar
and embedding, the extreme simplicity of the pronoun is not simply “grown.”
inventory, the lack of a perfect tense, the simplicity of 2. Linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in a cul-
the kinship system, the absence of creation myths, the tural community of speakers, because only by studying
lack of individual or collective memory of more than the culture and the grammar together can the linguist
two generations past, and the absence of drawing except (or ethnologist) understand either.
for extremely crude stick figures representing the spirit 3. Studies that merely look for constructions to inter-
world claimed to have been directly experienced follow act with a particular thesis by looking in an unsophis-
from the postulate of the cultural value of immediacy of ticated way at data from a variety of grammars are fun-
experience that constrains grammar and living. Pirahã damentally untrustworthy because they are too far
thus provides striking evidence for the influence of cul- removed from the original situation. Grammars, espe-
ture on major grammatical structures, contradicting cially those of little-studied languages, need an under-
Newmeyer’s (2002:361) assertion (citing “virtually all standing of the cultural matrix from which they emerged
linguists today”), that “there is no hope of correlating a to be properly evaluated or used in theoretical research.
language’s gross grammatical properties with sociocul- 4. Particulars can be as important as universals. This
tural facts about its speakers.” If I am correct, Pirahã is so because each culture-grammar pair could in prin-
shows that gross grammatical properties are not only ciple produce tensions and interactions found nowhere
correlated with sociocultural facts but may be deter- else, each case extending our understanding of the in-
mined by them. teraction of culture and grammar.
What does this mean for the nature of human language Now let us consider a final unusual feature of Pi-
or, at least, for Pirahã as a normal human language? It rahã—that the Pirahã continue to be monolingual in
is useful in this regard to review the well-known design Pirahã after more than 200 years of regular contact
features of human language proposed by Hockett (1960): with Brazilians and other non-Pirahã. New light is
vocal-auditory channel, broadcast transmission and di- shed on this question by the preceding discussion,

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634 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

conforming to many of the Pirahã’s own narrative ex- standard mentally—is easily disposed of. The source
planations of this fact. Simply, Portuguese is incom- of this collective conceptual deficit could only be ge-
mensurate with Pirahã in many areas and culturally netics, health, or culture. Genetics can be ruled out
incompatible, like all Western languages, in that it because the Pirahã people (according to my own ob-
violates the immediacy-of-experience constraint on servations and Nimuendajú’s have long intermarried
grammar and living in so many aspects of its structure with outsiders. In fact, they have intermarried to the
and use. The Pirahã say that their heads are different.
extent that no well-defined phenotype other than stat-
In fact, the Pirahã language is called ’apaitı́iso ‘a
ure can be identified. Pirahãs also enjoy a good and
straight head’, while all other languages are called
’apagáiso ‘a crooked head’. Our discussion here, I be- varied diet of fish, game, nuts, legumes, and fruits, so
lieve, helps us to understand this as more than a pa- there seems to be no dietary basis for any inferiority.
rochial ethnocentrism. Given the connection between We are left, then, with culture, and here my argument
culture and language in Pirahã, to lose or change one’s is exactly that their grammatical differences derive
language is to lose one’s identity as a Pirahã—hiaitı́ihı́, from cultural values. I am not, however, making a
‘a straight one/he is straight’. claim about Pirahã conceptual abilities but about their
expression of certain concepts linguistically, and this
is a crucial difference.
Conclusion As I mentioned in the beginning, the constraint
against discussing things outside of immediate expe-
Though Pirahã is an extreme case, it teaches us some- rience could have cognitive as well as grammatical
thing about the deep loss inherent in the death of any effects. For example, cognition is directly implicated
language, even if the people survive. When Portu-
in the claims of Gordon (2004) regarding the lack of
guese-speaking Muras visit the Pirahã today, the Pi-
counting in Pirahã, and one could argue that cognition
rahã do not envy them. They see them as simply sec-
ond-rate, false Brazilians. The Pirahã say, “We are not might be further implicated in each of the “gaps” and
Brazilians. We are Pirahã.” Without their language or unusual features of Pirahã grammar. One might also
their culture, they would fail to be Pirahã. Their lan- investigate the possibility that culture affects the cog-
guage is endangered because they themselves are en- nitive abilities and/or schemas available to members
dangered by the ever more intrusive presence of set- of Pirahã society. Pending future research, I am pre-
tlers, Western diseases, alcohol, and the inexorably pared to make only two very modest claims about Pir-
changing world that we live in. This beautiful lan- ahã cognition. First, if I am correct that the Pirahã
guage and culture, fundamentally different from any- cannot count (something that will require much more
thing the Western world has produced, have much to experimentation to determine), then it is likely that
teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about this is due to the long-term effects of the cultural con-
human nature, about living for each day and letting straints discussed above. Gordon (2004) alludes to a
the future take care of itself, about personal fortitude, Whorfian approach to the matter by claiming that Pi-
toughness, love, and many other values too numerous
rahã’s lack of counting might derive from their lack
to mention here. And this is but one example of many
of number words, but many societies in the Amazon
other endangered languages and cultures in the Am-
azon and elsewhere with “riches” of a similar nature and elsewhere have borrowed number words as they
that we may never know about because of our own develop economic ties that require numerical abilities.
shortsightedness. The need is more urgent than ever The hypothesis of this paper, which explains both the
for field researchers to document these languages and lack of counting and the lack of borrowing, is that
for more individuals and foundations to follow the Pirahã’s counting “deficiency” and their failure to bor-
lead of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Doc- row number words (in spite of commercial contact
ument Project and donate to support research on them. with Brazilians and in spite of borrowing their pro-
For advocates of universal grammar the arguments nouns) are due to cultural constraints. Second, if the
here present a challenge—defending an autonomous Pirahã show additional cognitive deviations from
linguistic module that can be affected in many of its Western expectations with regard to, for example,
core components by the culture in which it “grows.” color identification, ability to interpret multiply em-
If the form or absence of things such as recursion, bedded structures, or relative tense concepts (all mat-
sound structure, word structure, quantification, nu-
ters that require careful, culturally appropriate psy-
merals, number, and so on is tightly constrained by a
chological experimentation), then these would seem
specific culture, as I have argued, then the case for an
autonomous, biologically determined module of lan- most economically understood in terms of cultural
guage is seriously weakened. constraints as well. Thus what the paper has labored
An alternative view that has been suggested by some most intensely to establish, namely, that Pirahã cul-
readers of this paper, namely, that the gaps in Pirahã ture constrains Pirahã grammar, also predicts that the
discussed above are a result of a lack of “conceptual effect of this constraint could eventually affect cog-
structure”—in other words, that the Pirahã are sub- nition as well.

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 635

sus anecdotal) evidence on numerical cognition in pre-

Comments literate societies.
Pirahã is also not the only language known without
embedding. Foley (1986:177) describes the absence of re-
brent berlin cursion in Iatmul (New Guinea), where verbs “do not
Laboratories of Ethnobiology, Department of function as embedded parts within a whole, but are
Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA linked to a fully inflected verb in a linear string, much
30602, U.S.A. (obberlin@arches.uga.edu). 21 iv 05 like beads on a necklace. . . . Linking of clauses is at the
same structural level [nonhierarchical] rather than as
Everett argues that Pirahã violates three of Hockett’s
part within whole.” This grammatical feature has also
(1960) universal design features of language—inter-
been noted to be correlated with cultural complexity.
changeability, displacement, and productivity. As im-
The best-known work is Givón’s proposal of “pragmatic”
portant as this suggestion might be, the major thrust of
his article is that “culture can be causally implicated in and “syntactic” modes of speech that reflect changing
the linguistic structure of the language.” Seen in this functions of language with cultural evolution, leading
light, his paper is the most recent contribution to a grow- him to conclude that “certain types of languages—those
ing literature that challenges the dogma that there is no which have only coordination (‘clause chaining’) but no
causal correlation of “a language’s gross grammatical subordination—are found only in preliterate ‘societies of
properties with sociocultural facts about its speakers” intimates’” (Givón 1979:306; for detailed discussion see
(Newmeyer 2002:361). Kay 1972; Mithun 1984; Kalmár 1985; Pawley 1987; De-
The sociocultural facts in this case are drawn from the salles 2004; Newmeyer 2002, 2004; Wray and Grace n.d.).
Pirahã, a small indigenous society that exhibits one of A final example of research that firmly supports Ev-
the simplest cultures reported for lowland South Amer- erett’s conclusions on the correlation of cultural com-
ica. This cultural simplicity, Everett proposes, is mani- plexity and specific properties of grammar is Perkins’s
fest linguistically by what he calls “gaps” in the Pirahã (1992) important work on deixis. In a wide-ranging cross-
language—for example, absence of a concept for counting linguistic study, Perkins demonstrates conclusively that
and terms for quantification, of linguistically simple languages spoken in simpler societies commonly mark
terms for color of syntactic subordination, and of perfect deictic distinctions by complex internal grammatical
tense. These features, among others, are commonly processes while languages spoken by more complex so-
marked in the languages of societies considered cultur- cieties mark deictic distinctions syntactically.
ally complex in terms of standard measures such as those The concrete specificity of obligatory deictic distinc-
of Carneiro (1970), Murdock and Provost (1973), Naroll tions is also a distinguishing characteristic of the gram-
(1956), Hays (2000), and Marsh (1956). However, Everett mars of the languages of nonliterate societies. Examples
is careful to point out that “no one should draw the are seen in the Pirahã evidentials for specific knowledge
conclusion from this paper that the Pirahã language is -hı́ai ‘hearsay’, -xáagauá ‘observed’, -sibiga ‘deduced’,
in any way ‘primitive,’” calling attention to its highly -áti ‘uncertain’, -haı́ ‘relatively certain’, -há ‘certain’ (Ev-
complex verbal morphology and prosody (features that
erett 1986) and in Wari spatial demonstratives cwa’ ‘this:
he fails to note are also typical of the languages of small,
m/f’, ca’ ‘this:n’, ma’ ‘that:prox:hearer’, cwain ‘that:m/
local societies with simple cultures).
f:distal’, cain ‘that:n:distal’ (Everett and Kern 1997,
Everett’s proposals make his paper one of the most
Everett n.d.).
controversial to be published in anthropological linguis-
Everett’s paper will stimulate fieldwork on little-
tics in many years, perhaps since the appearance of Swa-
known languages spoken by societies with simple cul-
desh’s The Origin and Diversification of Language
(1971). However, his general hypothesis has a long his- tures. It will serve as a catalyst for new research that
tory that can be traced to much of the nineteenth- and will contribute to nonuniformitarianist approaches of
twentieth-century literature on the languages of so- language evolution (see Newmeyer 2002, 2004; Chris-
called primitive peoples. Lévy-Bruhl’s chapter on nu- tiansen and Kirby 2003; Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, and
meration in How Natives Think, for example, opens with Knight 1998; Knight, Studdert-Kennedy, and Hurford
the observation that “in a great many primitive peoples 2000; Wray 2002; Carstairs-McCarthy 1999) Perhaps it
. . . the only names for numbers are one and two, and will also lead those engaged in investigations of the lin-
occasionally three. Beyond these, the native says ‘many, guistic relativity-determinism hypothesis to add an evo-
a crowd, a multitude’” (1926:181). The multiple cases he lutionary dimension to their efforts at demonstrating the
cites closely mirror the system described by Everett for constraints of culture on the grammatical properties of
Pirahã and confirmed by Gordon (2004). Thus, Everett’s language. As Hymes has stated, “Only the renewal . . .
claim that “Pirahã is the only language known without of an evolutionary perspective can enable linguistic the-
number, numerals, or a concept of counting” is probably ory to connect languages and lives in a way that satisfies
an overstatement. What is important is that Everett’s the concerns among linguists for relevance of their in-
and Gordon’s research is sure to lead to field studies tellectual work and that satisfies the needs of mankind”
aimed at replicating it, providing new experimental (ver- (1971:v–vi).

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636 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

m a r c o a n t o n i o g o n ç a l v e s tion. For the Pirahã, experience “is fundamental to con-

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia e stituting a perception of the cosmos because it is that
Antropologia, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, which describes, links words and objects, observations
Largo do São Francisco de Paula, 1, sala 420, Rio de and their explanations, thought and act. Within this con-
Janeiro, Brazil (marcoantonio@ifcs.ufrj.br). 25 iv 05 ception, to gain the status of an organized discourse the
cosmos depends upon someone who lives it, who ex-
Pursuing the issues of “cultural constraint,” “univer- periences it” (Gonçalves 2001:32). The importance of ex-
sals,” and “absences” would draw attention away from perience in the constitution of Amazonian “culture” was
what I take to be the central question in Everett’s article, summarized very well by Gow (1991:151): “I take lit-
that of the role of experience in the construction of gram- erally what native people say about distant ascendant
mar and its possible transpositions to the Amazonian kin, which is that they do not know anything about them
cultural and cosmological context. I shall seek to engage because they never saw them. This is noted by numerous
with this question. other ethnographers of Native Amazonian culture, but
Seeger (1981:21), inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s Mytholo- usually thought to show the ‘shallow time frame’ of
giques (especially 1964:chap. 1), identified the basis of these societies. . . . The shallow time frame of these
an Amazonian cosmology as follows: “A cosmology is societies is not a product of their failure to accumulate
expressed in more than the abstract thought of idle information in deep genealogies, but rather a result of
minds; material things and human relations are also ex- their stress on personal experience in epistemology.” If
pressions of principles that may be expressed elsewhere the Pirahã are not a cultural exception within the Am-
as abstract thoughts.” Viveiros de Castro (1986:252, 253; azonian context, they most likely are not a linguistic
1992) also calls attention to a possible conceptualization exception either. It is up to Amazonian linguists to en-
of cosmology specific to the Amazon, emphasizing that gage with Everett’s provocative argument and to rethink
“cosmology” does not necessarily imply a balanced and the grammar of Amazonian languages in terms of the
harmonious system saturated with meaning. Therefore, value that experience assumes in its definition.
the idea of “absolute postulates” that would engender
fields of perception and modes of acting in and concep-
tualizing the world or that presuppose existence without paul kay
experience would not be applicable to Amazonian cul- International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center
ture and cosmology. Overing (1996), in translating the St., Berkeley, CA 94704, U.S.A. (kay@cogsci.berkeley.
concept of “performative” to the Amazonian universe, edu). 2 v 05
proposes the term “generative” to accentuate the im-
portance of experience for those ontologies, given that it Despite the very broad interest of this paper, I must re-
is the appropriate act that generates relations. This is a strict my comments to a single aspect, color terminol-
particular mode of constructing social relations and ways ogy. I will suggest (1) that although not all languages have
of thinking about the world that is based on a specific a set of color terms that jointly name all the colors (Lyons
capacity—always personalized, that is, derived from ex- 1995, Kay and Maffi 1999, Levinson 2000), given the Pi-
perience—to produce culturally acceptable things. Basso rahã concern with concrete, immediate experience we
(1995:149) pointed out that the importance of stories for might expect Pirahã to do so and (2) that Pirahã may.
the Kalapalo consisted not in their representing collec- Thus, although I find reason to doubt Everett’s conclu-
tively accepted images that animate social life but, on sion that Pirahã has no color terms, I believe that their
the contrary, in their describing the experiences of in- actual presence would support his broader claims re-
dividuals exploring alternatives for their lives. Even in garding Pirahã predilection for immediate experience.
narratives that seem fixed, such as myths and songs, one 1. Experience of color is about as direct as experience
can discern an important process of individualization gets. I refer here not to reified color concepts such as
that accentuates experience as the basis of this percep- that figuring in a sentence like “Red is exciting” but to
tion, frequently reflected in the first-person telling of the directly perceived color sensation, as expressed in a sen-
narrative. Other writings, such as those of Oakdale (2002: tence like “I want the red apple.” Everett (personal com-
165–66) and Lagrou (1998), demonstrate that for the Kay- munication) states that Pirahã color expressions are used
abi and the Cashinahua understanding of the meaning in the latter way and not the former—that is, that they
of songs depends upon a contextualized interpretation of are used as modifiers or predicates but not as substan-
the metaphors used in them. Urban (1989:40) points out tives. Hence, I claim, Pirahã color expressions convey
that for the Xavante the first-person narratives of myths immediate sensations, not abstract concepts. Linguisti-
produce a trancelike state in which the narrator begins cally, color terms exemplify a rare, arguably unique lex-
to experience the narrative in an individualized way. My ical field in that its distinctions are directly traceable to
research on the Pirahã highlights the importance of ex- complex peripheral neural structures—in the retina. Hu-
perience in the way that the Pirahã represent the world. man color vision is probably shared throughout the ca-
My book Unfinished World: Action and Creation in an tarrhine primates (De Valois et al. 1974, Sandell, Gross,
Amazonian Cosmology seeks to demonstrate that the and Bornstein 1979), and it is generally held that the
world is constituted through action and creation, de- trichromatic system of the catarrhines coevolved with
pending structurally upon experience for its construc- red or orange ripe fruit (Mollon 1989, Regan et al. 2001).

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 637

Humans’ immediate experience of color is in all likeli- being immature” doesn’t mean “green-or-blue,” al-
hood the same as that of apes and Old World monkeys. though finding a word meaning “green or blue” that is
Color sensations would appear to qualify as exemplifying based on an expression that originally means “imma-
“direct, concrete experience” if anything does. ture” or “unripe” is not uncommon.
2. Everett’s conclusion of “no color words” is based in Pirahã has color terms if the Sheldon results can be
part on the formal complexity of the Pirahã color ex- replicated under better-controlled conditions. Presence
pressions and in part on his impression that Pirahã color of true color terms would not be surprising in view of
naming is highly variable. With regard to syntactic com- the Pirahã preference for linguistic encoding only of di-
plexity, an example is a3hoa3s aa3ga1, literally ‘immature rect, concrete experience.
be.temporary’, which the World Color Survey field lin-
guist Stephen Sheldon found to be a widely shared term
meaning “green-or-blue with a focus in green.” It is fairly stephen c. levinson
common in the world’s languages for a word meaning Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Postbus 310,
“green” (or “green-or-blue”) to be closely related to a 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands (stephen.
word meaning “immature” or “unripe” (for example, En- levinson@mpi.nl). 22 iv 05
glish and all the Celtic languages), but this pattern is not
universal. One cannot predict that an expression mean- There is a growing interest in human diversity through-
ing “immature” will also mean “green” or “grue.” Ev- out the human sciences, but unequivocally establishing
erett writes a3hoa3s aa3ga1 as two words; Sheldon writes the facts is a difficult and delicate business. Everett has
it without a space, indicating that he sees it as a single neither established the facts nor handled the rhetorical
word like forget-me-not, jack-in-the- pulpit, or burnt si- delicacies that would be essential to establishing a
enna. The first two examples are English plant terms bridgehead for studies of linguistic and cultural diversity
and the third is an English color term, their internal among the universalizing sciences. In a nutshell, here
syntactic complexity (and the vagaries of orthography) are the main criticisms:
notwithstanding. 1. The central proposition, roughly “Pirahã live in the
With regard to possible variability of Pirahã color ex- present,” is too vague to be supported by the ad hoc
pressions, Everett cites “interspeaker variation in nam- collection of cultural features adduced. Nor does the ar-
ing colors” in partial support for his view that the color
gumentation remotely approach the standard of the clas-
expressions in question are “fully compositional
sic anthropology on cultural coherence (e.g., Benedict
phrases” (personal communication). Given the long and
1934, Geertz 1960), let alone those set in modern lin-
intimate experience of Dan and Keren Everett with every
guistic discussions (e.g., Enfield 2002).
aspect of Pirahã life and language, this opinion merits
2. Most of the features listed are not sufficiently well
respect. At the same time, it runs directly counter to the
established to satisfy the sceptics who should be the tar-
systematic work of Sheldon in exposing 25 Pirahã speak-
gets of this article. One simply has to take or leave the
ers to 330 colored stimuli for naming in a fixed random
various assertions, admitted to be “largely unreplicable,”
order and then eliciting their best-example judgments
from a palette showing all the colors at once. Sheldon’s even though many of them have the weak logical char-
results show strong consensus on the roster of Pirahã acter of statements of non-occurrence. Further, Everett
color names and equally strong consensus on the specific casts doubt on the fieldworking capacities of the only
ranges of colors they name and on their judgments of other researchers who might have been marshalled in
best examples, although he notes that “there was dis- defence of his claims. If something can be known, it can
cussion [during color-naming sessions] among everyone be shown, and the duty of the researcher is to document
. . . even though I asked them to do it individually with it.
me” (personal communication). 3. It is far from clear that Pirahã is the only language
In deciding whether the Pirahã color expressions are without a counting system (cf. Aboriginal languages of
proper color terms, the issues are just two: (A) Are the Australia [Dixon 2002:67]) or the only language without
color meanings consensual and applicable to unfamiliar colour terms (cf. the controversies with, e.g., Saunders
objects that exhibit the color property (as well as familiar and van Brackel 1997, Levinson 2000) or the only lan-
objects)? (B) Are the color meanings not predictable from guage without embedding (cf. again Australian languages
the meanings of the words or morphemes that make up [Hale 1976, Dixon 1995, Austin and Bresnan 1996] and
the expressions and the rules of the language? If both Nicaraguan sign language [Pyers n.d.]). That cultures
answers are yes, then these expressions are color terms. may systematically lack genealogical depth or visual art
The results of Sheldon’s investigation apparently yield a has also long been noted (Goody 1993). What is meant
yes answer to question A. Everett plans to repeat Shel- to count as further attestation only reveals further reason
don’s field experiment to see whether the consensual for doubt: for example, earlier-documented colour terms
result can be replicated (personal communication). With among the Pirahã are dismissed because the expressions
regard to question B, it is clear from the analytical glosses are compositional (e.g., “bloodlike”), but the current
that Everett gives to the four Pirahã color expressions work on colour terms does not treat this as exceptional
that the color meanings of these expressions do not fol- (see, e.g., Kay and Maffi 1999). The danger is that by
low from their compositional meanings: “temporarily oversimplifying and claiming the uniqueness of individ-

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638 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

ual Pirahã cultural features the value of genuine obser- andrew pawley
vations about a unique complex of features will be lost. Department of Linguistics, RSPAS, Australian
4. Blatant inconsistencies likewise do nothing to re- National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
assure the reader. For example, we are told that the Pi- (apawley@coombs.anu.edu.au). 21 iv 05
rahã are monolingual, but we find that “often this or
that Pirahã informant would tell me (in Portuguese) that Everett’s thought-provoking paper makes several strong
. . .” and that Pirahã “have long intermarried with out- claims. I will first address those that seem to me to have
siders,” suggesting sustained bilingualism. Elsewhere it little merit and then turn to those to which I am more
is stated that there are bilingual informants, although sympathetic.
their Portuguese is poor. I don’t think Pirahã is a serious threat to Hockett’s
5. Having made the Pirahã sound like the mindless universal design features. Everett has misinterpreted two
bearers of an almost subhumanly simple culture, Everett of Hockett’s key terms. He takes “interchangeability”
ends with a paean to “this beautiful language and cul- to mean “intertranslatability”—that what can said in
ture” with “so much to teach us.” As one of the few one language can be said in any other. However, Hockett
spokespersons for a small, unempowered group, he (1958:578) defines “interchangeability” as a relation be-
surely has some obligation to have presented a more bal- tween speakers and hearers: any speaker of language X
anced picture throughout. can understand what someone else says in X and can say
All this is a pity, as I have little doubt that, due al- the same things. Intertranslatability was not one of
lowances made, this human group lacks some of the Hockett’s universals. The point has been made very
complexities that we think of as distinctive of the spe- forcefully by Grace (1987) and others that natural lan-
cies. One of the dubious truisms enshrined in the text- guages are far from fully intertranslatable. People cannot
books is that all human languages are equally complex readily talk about a subject matter when they do not
and equally expressive. Recently there has been exten- have the words, formulas, etc., that define the substance
sive discussion of what we should mean by complexity of discourse about that subject matter. The more differ-
in language and what the sources of variable complexity ent two cultures are, the fewer subject matters they will
might be (e.g., McWhorter 2001, Trudgill 2004). Embed- have in common.
ding the Pirahã case in this wider discussion raises the By “productivity” Hockett means being able to say
question whether Pirahã, represented (according to the
things that have never been said before. Pirahã clearly
Ethnologue) by just 150 individuals, is not a creolized,
has productivity in this sense. But Everett uses “pro-
stripped-down remnant of some earlier, more complex
ductivity” in a way that links it to full intertranslata-
set of systems (as discussed in the literature on language
bility (“Productivity is also shown to be severely re-
attrition and death [e.g., Sasse 1992]). Everett tries to head
stricted by Pirahã culture, since there are simply things
off this interpretation but notes that the Pirahã were
that cannot be talked about, for reasons of form and con-
once part of a powerful “Mura nation,” and the idea that
tent”), and languages are not fully intertranslatable.
the pronoun system is borrowed indeed suggests some
Pirahã speech is said to exhibit only one degree of dis-
intensive contact or language-shift situation.
Everett suggests that his analysis undercuts the neo- placement. The arguments for this claim are problem-
Whorfian emphasis on the importance of language in atic. It would seem that Pirahã has considerable appa-
cognition (as in Lucy 1992b, Levinson 2003a, Majid et ratus for talking about non-immediate experience but
al. 2004, and Gordon 2004), since he prefers an account that there is a strong cultural preference not to do so. To
in terms of the causal efficacy of culture, but no one assess the linguistic basis of the one-degree-of-displace-
interested in language diversity would make a simple ment claim would require a well-founded scale of ab-
dichotomy between language and culture: a language of stractness and careful examination of polysemy and var-
course is a crucial part of a culture and is adapted to the ious kinds of discourses by various speakers.
rest of it (see Levinson 2003a:316–25). The question that I am sympathetic to the view that parts of a language
neo-Whorfians are interested in is how culture gets into are shaped by cultural values and practices. This is un-
the head, so to speak, and here language appears to play controversial when it comes to lexical semantics, met-
a crucial role: it is learnt far earlier than most aspects of aphor, pragmatics, and discourse structure but harder to
culture, is the most highly practiced set of cultural skills, demonstrate in morpho-syntax (Enfield 2002). It is not
and is a representation system that is at once public and clear that the lexico-grammatical properties of Pirahã
private, cultural and mental. It is hard to explain non- that Everett refers to are due specifically to the imme-
ecologically induced uniformities in cognitive style diacy-of-experience constraint. The stock of Pirahã verbs
without invoking language as a causal factor (see Lev- can be extended by combining verb roots but only if the
inson 2003a:chap. 7; 2003b). sequence refers to a culturally accepted event. This con-
Everett has missed an opportunity here to follow up straint seems to be true of verb compounding and seri-
on interest generated by Gordon’s (2004) persuasive anal- alization in all languages. It reflects a universal cultural-
ysis of the Pirahã absence of numeracy: only with a sober cum-linguistic tendency for conventional concepts to get
catalogue of carefully documented features would we be lexicalized; people develop streamlined ways of saying
in a position to ask whether they formed a larger pattern familiar things. Whether constraints on what it is con-
and what the origins of that pattern might be. ventional to say are a matter of grammar, lexicon, or

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 639

idiomaticity depends on how one chooses to define these reality of these categories for that society. Everett’s ar-
constructs (Pawley 1986). ticle illustrates that this and other universalistic reduc-
Some other languages, for example, Warlpiri, have very tionisms do not survive rigorous testing against the re-
limited counting systems (one, two, many) and/or only ality of the practical usage of a given language. Although
two basic color terms (light, dark), and/or no clear cases I mostly agree with Everett’s critical work, I have some
of embedding, but in such cases there has been no sug- reservations about the way it is formulated and espe-
gestion of an immediate-experience constraint (as speak- cially about his alternative proposal. My main objection
ers have rich mythologies, easily learn European count- is that he stresses the deficiencies of the Pirahã language
ing systems, and so on). It is usual to give a utilitarian (the only positive feature of the language is a very rich
explanation of these limitations. Here we run into the prosody developed only in an appendix) and says little
perennial problem of functionalist explanations: How to about how the users of this language communicate.
falsify them? How to avoid the suggestion of teleology? This could lead us to believe that the Pirahã do not
If Pirahã behavior and thought are as Everett says— have developed communication because their language
and one craves a detailed ethnography of Pirahã speech does not permit it. However, I doubt that Everett believes
and social psychology, including documentation of in- this in view of the way he defends himself against the
dividual variation—it may well be that something like embarrassing impression of primitivism that his descrip-
the immediate-experience constraint does underlie the tion of the Pirahã conveys. We could therefore conceive
absence of myths, lack of interest in remote things, etc. that, far from lying in the structure of the language, the
Compare the mind-set that makes many urban dwellers problem arises from the historical conditions endured by
indifferent to the plant species of their vicinity: a sample this community. In this respect the text is somewhat
of San Francisco Bay area residents had a range of from contradictory. On the one hand it argues against the pos-
just 10 to 34 tree/shrub names (Witkowski and Burris sibility of the language’s deficiencies’ constituting a faux
1981) even though many more species were present. Why archaism, a consequence of the demographic weakness
do some people pay close attention to certain parts of and other traumas inflicted by an aggressive colonial en-
their environment and others not? It is too easy to say, vironment, by asserting (although failing to demonstrate)
in this case, that “people attend to what is useful.” Typ- that the 200 years of contact were not especially incisive.
ically, tribal peoples (and some others) know the salient On the other hand, it presents as an argument for cul-
attributes not only of useful species but also of many ture’s determining role on language the fact that the Pi-
that are not useful. Established expertise in a domain rahã are monolingual despite all these years of regular
gives people a mind-set to be curious about many things contact with Brazilians. If indeed this contact failed to
in that domain (see Berlin 1991 and Hays 1991 on “util- be influential, the Pirahã’s monolingualism may mean
itarian” versus “intellectualist” explanations of folk not that they were unable to learn Portuguese but that
taxonomies). they did not need to.
Everett’s claims about the connections between cul- If Everett believes that the Pirahã have a high level of
ture, subject matter preferences, and linguistic resources communication despite the simplicity of their language,
raise a cluster of important issues of conceptual frame- he should demonstrate how they communicate. He pro-
work and method. One conclusion of his I agree with vides us with a clue when he asserts the primacy of
entirely. If linguists want reliable descriptions of ordi- culture over language and adds that the Pirahã “restrict
nary spoken languages, they need to do extended field- communication to the immediate experience of the in-
work and immerse themselves in the cultural contexts terlocutors.” However, he does not go into all the con-
of language use. sequences of his assertions, leaving his alternative pro-
posal to be vaguely intuited. He fails to tell us, for
instance, whether in the end the language exists for him
a l e x a n d r e s u r r a l l é s or, as Ingold (2000:392–93), believes, that it is only be-
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (CNRS), Collège cause of the reification of speech, made possible through
de France, 52 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris, writing, that the idea of language as an entity (a collec-
France (alexandre.surralles@college-de-france.fr). tion of rules and signifiers with a generative potential)
15 iv 05 exists in Western thought. If he does not agree with this
radical position, he should illustrate the use that the
Everett’s article confirms loud and clear what many an- Pirahã make of grammatical language, the meaning that
thropologists believe: to study language in isolation from they give to it, and how they include it in other com-
the context in which it is produced poses a high risk of munication practices such as the body language of feel-
simplification. The most common is the projection of ing and other sensory, polysensory, or synaesthetic forms
categories alien to the language under study. For exam- of nonverbal communication as some of us are attempt-
ple, to address colour-term systems or other classifica- ing to do in the Amazon (Surrallés 2003). These consti-
tory systems without previously questioning the config- tute ways of communication related to the notion of
uration or even the relevance of these categories for a “immediate experience” that Everett suggests, that is,
given society is a practice (far too common in anthro- experience that can be directly perceived.
pology for us to overlook when it appears in linguistic These silences can be related to a general lack of eth-
studies) that leads to the fallacy of demonstrating the nographic contextualization of the Pirahã linguistic data

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640 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

that is surprising coming from a linguist who seeks to from the point of view of this functional-typological-
build bridges with anthropology. Everett devotes a num- historical approach to language, Everett’s findings and
ber of paragraphs to the Pirahã ethnographic background, hypotheses make perfect sense. If members of a speech
but only as an introduction. Moreover, anthropologists community do not talk about events remote in time and
today work collectively on groups of societies rather than space, then there is no raw material to be transformed
on isolated units. Everett should consider in more depth into grammatical markers for such things as tense and
the ethnographic and linguistic descriptions of other aspect.
scholars working among the Pirahã and related groups I am no expert on the facts of the matter here. Perhaps
to convince us that his theses are not the result of a Everett’s specific analyses need revising in some partic-
personal bias in his data gathering, given that he offers ular ways. But the question is: from a large-scale theo-
only his own data as evidence. In short, ethnographic retical point of view, what is the alternative? And the
and linguistic analyses should require more scrupulous answer is, as Everett notes, universal grammar. In my
integration. This void may be due to a slightly anach- experience, what normally happens when proponents of
ronistic view of anthropology and of the notion of culture universal grammar hear reports like Everett’s is that they
associated with the discipline. Indeed, it seems that for simply do not believe them. The nonembedded Pirahã
Everett “culture” encompasses everything but language. sentence structures reported, for example, really do have
He should bear in mind the decade of work that anthro- embedding, they will claim; it is just at an underlying
pology, particularly in the Amazon (e.g., Descola 1994, level where we can’t see it. The evidence for this claim
Viveiros de Castro 1998), has dedicated to criticizing the is that one could translate these nonembedded structures
notion of culture and the dichotomy that it establishes into embedded structures in, for example, English. But
with the notion of nature. this is just “the Latin fallacy.” Sensible people stopped
analyzing other European languages by analogy to Latin
many years ago, and we should stop analyzing the struc-
michael tomasello tures of non-European languages by analogy to European
Department of Developmental and Comparative languages now. One of the most thoughtful analyses
Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary along these lines is that of Comrie (1998), who argues
Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, that what we translate from Japanese as relative clauses
Germany (tomas@eva.mpg.de). 17 iii 05 really do not have the same structure and work quite
differently. Therefore, without arguing the particulari-
The best-kept secret in modern linguistics is that we ties of the case Everett presents, it is perfectly reasonable
actually know where grammar comes from. Virtually all that the structures of the Pirahã language are very dif-
of the so-called function words in a language have their ferent from those of other languages. Because they talk
origin in content words such as nouns and verbs (de- about different things, different things get grammat-
monstratives are an exception [Diessel 1999]). Case icalized.
markers and agreement markers most often originate in In light of the fact that we know that languages differ
freestanding words such as spatial prepositions, pro- greatly in their syntactic structures and we know how
nouns, and even nouns and verbs. The English future grammaticalization takes place in many specific in-
markers will and gonna are both derived from freestand- stances in particular languages, how can anyone main-
ing verbs, and the definite article the is derived from a tain the hypothesis of a universal grammar? The answer
demonstrative. Something similar can happen on the is to make the concept immune to falsification. Thus,
level of whole syntactic constructions as loose discourse in universal grammar analyses, the most common prac-
sequences such as He pulled the door and it opened tice is to invoke universal grammar without specifying
become more tightly organized syntactic constructions precisely what is intended, as if we all knew what it was.
such as He pulled the door open (see Traugott and Heine Here are examples of what is said to be in universal
1991, Hopper and Traugott 1993, Bybee, Perkins, and grammar from people who are bold enough to be specific:
Pagliuca 1994). O’Grady (1997) proposes that it includes both lexical and
Basically, as people communicate about content, con- functional categories. Jackendoff (2002) includes x-bar
tent words need to be “glued together” to make coherent syntax and the linking rules NP p object and VP p
messages fitting the cognitive and attentional capacities action. Pinker (1994) agrees and adds “subject” and “ob-
and predispositions of human beings: such things as force ject,” movement rules, and grammatical morphology.
dynamic scenes (with agents and patients) to fit with Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999) list wh- movement, island
human causal/intentional cognition, topic-comment constraints, the subset principle, head movement, c-
structure to fit with human attentional needs, and prag- command, the projection principle, and the empty-cat-
matic grounding to help identify and locate objects and egory principle. Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) point
actions in space and time. In other words, particular to the computational procedure of recursion and Chom-
things get grammaticalized in the way that they do be- sky (2004) to the syntactic operation of “merge.” Baker
cause human cognition and communication work the (2001), Fodor (2003), and Wunderlich (2004) all present
way that they do. The starting point of the process, of very different lists of features and parameters. There
course, is the particular content that people choose to seems to be no debate about which of these or other
talk about in a particular linguistic community. And so accounts of universal grammar should be preferred and

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 641

why. This problem is particularly acute in the study of inely distinctive features. To say that ti ’ogi means,
language acquisition, where there is no evidence that literally, “my bigness” (rather than “we”) is like saying
children begin with the abstract linguistic categories that in English to understand means, literally, “to stand
characteristic of most accounts of universal grammar under.” To deny that hi ’ogi means “all” is to make a
(Tomasello 2003). similar mistake.
Universal grammar was a good try, and it really was In claiming that Pirahã has no word for “all,” Everett
not so implausible at the time it was proposed, but since is joining the long tradition of “primitive-thought”
then we have learned a lot about many different lan- scholars such as Hallpike (1979), who also claimed that,
guages, and they simply do not fit one universal cookie for example, Australian Aborigines had no word for “all”
cutter. Everett’s case is extreme, but there are others that and, accordingly, were not capable of making generali-
create similar problems for the theory. In science, when zations. Everett insists that the Pirahã language is not
theory and facts conflict, given a large enough body of in any way “primitive,” but the fact of the matter is that
reliable facts, theory loses, and we must come up with without a word (or wordlike element) meaning “all”
something new. speakers could not make generalizations. Accordingly,
despite his protestations, Everett is presenting Pirahã as
“primitive” language.
anna wierzbicka Despite the sensational tone of Everett’s paper, most
School of Language Studies, Australian National of the other “gaps” that he sees in Pirahã are insignifi-
University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia cant. Many languages lack numerals, and, as the Aus-
(anna.wierzbicka@anu.edu.au). 1 iv 05 tralian experience shows, their speakers can readily bor-
row or develop them when they need them. What
Because I fully agree with Everett’s general claim that matters is that the language does have words for the
to a considerable degree culture shapes language and that universal semantic primes “one,” “two,” and “many.”
meaning is central to the understanding of both lan- Out of these (and some other primes clearly present in
guages and cultures, I deplore all the more his extrava- Pirahã), all other numerals, quantifiers, and counting
gant and unsubstantiated specific claims, which are practices can be developed. All the pronouns currently
based on deeply flawed methodology and which ignore used in Pirahã “were borrowed recently from a Tupi-
the wide-ranging and methodologically rigorous studies Guarani language,” but all languages have identifiable
reported in Meaning and Universal Grammar (Goddard exponents of “I” and “you,” and, whatever the source of
and Wierzbicka (2002)—studies which have led to the the current inventory, Pirahã is clearly no exception in
discovery of 65 universal semantic primes lying at the this regard. Pirahã has no colour words, but countless
heart of all languages. other languages lack colour words, and the concept of
Many of Everett’s claims about Pirahã are in fact en- “colour” itself is culture-specific (cf. Wierzbicka 1996,
tirely consistent with the universals we have posited. At n.d.). What matters is that they all have the concept of
the same time, some of these universals are alleged by “see.” Again, as the Australian experience shows, speak-
Everett to be absent from Pirahã. For reasons of space, I ers of such languages can quickly build such concepts
will focus here on “all,” whose alleged absence from when they become interested in the relevant technolo-
Australian languages I have discussed in detail (Wierz- gies and practices.
bicka (1996). The alleged absence of a word for “all” in Pirahã is no doubt “largely incommensurate with En-
Pirahã is clearly refuted by the material cited by Everett glish,” but it is not fundamentally so: on the available
himself, and the failure to recognize its presence is a evidence, it has the same set of semantic primes, out of
glaring example of the weakness of the semantic analysis which all other, culture-dependent, meanings can be
in his paper. constructed. Boas and Sapir got it right: languages can
Can one say things like “All the men went swimming” differ enormously in their semantic systems, but all evi-
in Pirahã? The answer is clearly yes, as Everett’s ex- dence points to what Boas called “the psychic unity of
amples (10) and (12) show. Concepts such as “every,” mankind.” The universal semantic primes provide the
“most,” and “few” are far from universal, but “all” does bedrock of that unity and a touchstone for linguistic
occur in all languages, and Pirahã is evidently no excep- semantics.
tion. Everett does not see this: his interlineal gloss for
hiaitı́ihı́ hi ’ogi ‘all the [Pirahã] people’ is “Pirahã people
he big.” The fact that the same segment used in one
syntactic frame can mean “big” and in another “all” Reply
misleads him into thinking that there is no word for “all”
in Pirahã—a conclusion clearly contradicted by his own
daniel l. everett1
data. The concept of polysemy is a basic tool in semantic
Manchester, U.K. 18 v 05
analysis, and rejecting it altogether leads to ludicrous
results such as the following “literal” gloss: “My bigness
The most important point of my paper is that evidence
ate [at] a bigness of fish, nevertheless there was a small-
for language evolution can be found in living languages,
ness we did not eat.” In using such glosses, Everett ex-
oticizes the language rather than identifying its genu- 1. I thank Brent Berlin, George Grace, Paul Kay, Alison Wray, Sally

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
642 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

and therefore hypotheses such as universal grammar are results because we are unable to say to what degree the
inadequate to account for the Pirahã facts because they agreement on the color terms is the result of consensus
assume that language evolution has ceased to be shaped achieved through group discussion versus repeated in-
by the social life of the species (e.g., Newmeyer 2002: dividual use of the same terms independently. Therefore,
361). At the same time, this does not warrant labeling the experiments are contaminated and need to be rerun.
different evolutionary paths more or less “primitive.” Further, Keren Everett has conducted informal tests
I agree with Tomasello’s assessment of the issues and on Pirahã ability to name colors and has observed (per-
Pirahã’s place in the universal-grammar debate. sonal communication, 2005) that speakers frequently
Berlin claims that other languages are known that lack disagree on the description of colors. I have observed this
numbers and embedding, but I must disagree. Some lan- variation independently. Moreover, different phrases can
guages have been claimed to have only “one,” “two,” be used by the same speaker to describe the same color
and “many,” but those are numbers. in the same situation. For example, the particle ’igiábiı́
Neither Hale (1976), Dixon (1995), nor any of the other ‘like’ is often used: pii ’igiábiı́ ‘blue’ (like water); bii ’ig-
references cited by Pawley, Berlin, and Levinson claim iábiı́ ‘red’ (like blood), etc. In addition, color terms can
that any language lacks recursion, although Australian, vary according to what they describe, so that different
Papuan, and other languages often use nonsubordinating descriptions may be used for different objects, rather than
clause-joining strategies where English, say, might use generalized color terms (e.g., black for animals, for hu-
recursion. Rachel Nordlinger’s work in progress supports mans, for inanimates): biopaı́ai ‘black’ (for a human; lit.
my point. ‘dirty blood’); kopaı́ai ‘black’ (for an animal; lit. ‘dirty
Gonçalves, who has spent roughly 18 months over a eye’); hoigii ’igiábiı́ ‘black/dark’ (usually for inanimates;
period of several years living among the Pirahã and writ- lit. ‘like dirty’).
ten two books on Pirahã culture, accepts my claim that I agree with Kay that color is an immediate sensation.
experience guides culture and grammar in Pirahã and But the naming of it is not. A property name that gen-
connects it to more general work, initiated by Seeger eralizes over immediate expressions is an abstraction, a
(1981), on Amazonian worldview. His remarks in this variable. My claim is, again, that the Pirahã avoid this
regard are suggestive and useful. (hence the near absence of adjectives and adverbs). Color
Surrallés’s principal objection to my paper is that it terms are abstractions; the descriptions of colors are not.
appears to portray the Pirahã as communicatively defi- Abstractions violate the proposed principle of immedi-
cient. He rightly points out that there is a need for a acy; phrasal descriptions do not. My account predicts
systematic ethnography of communication for Pirahã, that in Pirahã colors will be described by phrases ac-
but his objection (shared by Levinson) that I have por- cording to each experience rather than given variable-
trayed the Pirahã as primitive in thought is ethnocentric. like names (the latter might be possible, but only in vi-
That the language does not avail itself of grammatical
olation of the proposed constraint).
resources used in other languages neither renders it in-
Pawley says that I have misunderstood Hockett’s iner-
ferior to other languages nor, as Levinson claims, makes
changeability design feature, but what Hockett (1958:
its speakers “mindless.” Surrallés warns me against di-
578) says it means is
chotomizing culture and nature, but I have tried to es-
tablish the opposite, namely, that cultural values shape that any participating organism equipped for the
the language that ultimately emerges from them. My transmission of messages in the system is also
paper should be taken as an argument for his position, equipped to receive messages in the same system,
not against it. and vice versa. For language, any speaker of a lan-
Kay claims that Sheldon’s experiments, if accurate and guage is in principle also a hearer, and is theoreti-
replicable, establish the existence of color terms in Pir- cally capable of saying anything he is able to under-
ahã and that, in fact, the existence of color terms is har- stand when someone else says it. Bee dancing and
monious with my proposal that grammar is constrained gibbon calls also involve interchangeability, but our
by experience. Sheldon (personal communication, April other animal systems do not. In the courtship sig-
2005) says the following about his experiments: “The nalling of sticklebacks, for example, it is obvious
Pirahã like to participate together. I tried to keep things that the male and the female cannot change roles.
separate, but even with the small study behind the Nor can one imagine gazelles roaring and lions
house, others come by to listen. The topic becomes of fleeing.
immediate interest to everyone, and there was discus-
sion among everyone of what was being done, etc. I am Hockett’s gazelle-and-lion example doesn’t fit Paw-
quite sure they discussed things among themselves even ley’s understanding. What is at issue is a system of com-
though I asked them to do it individually with me.” He munication across species, not within a species.
adds that he agrees with the conclusion that I draw from Pawley’s understanding of Hockett pivots on the
his work, namely, that the poor experimental control meaning of “same system.” He thinks that it means
raises potential problems with the interpretation of his “same language.” I claim that it means “same-species
communication system.” This difference of opinion may
Thomason, Peter Ladefoged, Nigel Vincent, Ted Gibson, and be due to Hockett’s tendency to shift between properties
Jeanette Sakel for comments on this reply. of “Language” and “A language.” The function of inter-

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 e v e r e t t Cultural Constraints on Pirahã Grammar F 643

changeability and his other design features is to identify requires a leap; it introduces quantification, the con-
something specific about Homo sapiens. To do that it cepts expressed by the words “some” and “all.”
must entail something at the species level rather than Once we advance to this stage, we have arrived at
at the individual language level. The evolutionarily in- languages that match, or begin to match, our own in
teresting understanding of interchangeability is therefore complexity. . . . It is here, in my opinion, that we
just this: anything one can understand from a conspecific reach the degree of expressive sophistication that we
one should be able to say to another conspecific. Bicul- associate with thought, for it is only at this level
tural, bilingual individuals will in principle (though per- that there is positive evidence that the speaker of
haps not in practice) be able to communicate anything the language can predicate properties of objects and
they hear in either language, since they have fully un- events.
derstood it. But Hockett’s interchangeability, under my
By the Pirahã evidence both Davidson and Wierzbicka
interpretation, must be abandoned if Pirahã has followed are wrong. Thought need not be reflected directly in lan-
its own evolutionary path. Thus a Portuguese-fluent Pir- guage. The fact that the Pirahã lack the word “all,” using
ahã could not communicate perfect tenses in Pirahã. instead, say, generics, means simply that their syllogistic
This limitation is connected to the question I raise re- reasoning will nearly though not quite match our own,
garding borrowing. Why are the Pirahã unlike other giving them the ability to deal well with the world
groups in not borrowing number words? Further, why around them but not to teach Western logic at this time
are they still monolingual? Because their “core gram- in their cultural history.
mar” lacks the resources to express certain concepts and Levinson displays deep misunderstanding of my pro-
their culture prohibits certain ways of talking. My con- posed experience principle, claiming that it limits talk
clusion is thus a stronger argument against intertrans- to the present. As I have said, this principle includes
latability than even Grace’s (1987), which was based on experiences over several generations. He further says
general principles. that the list of properties adduced in support of the prin-
Pawley also objects to my understanding of produc- ciple of immediate experience is disjointed. Whether any
tivity. According to Hockett (1958:576) productivity list coheres is a matter not of taste but of argumentation.
means that “a speaker may say something he has never Each feature listed is one that is highly unusual or unique
said nor heard before and be understood perfectly by his to Pirahã. One can simply say that there is no link be-
audience, without either speaker or hearer being in the tween them, or one can consider them as sharing the
slightest aware of the novelty.” On one level, this refers property that they avoid violations of the experience
strictly to combinatorics, but Hockett’s formulation it- principle. This property creates an intensional, non-dis-
self must be revised, as I have argued, because it fails to junctive set. Claims for disjointedness of the set of prop-
consider the vast variation in resources for productivity erties discussed must engage the evidence in favor of the
available to individual languages. Pirahã shows that common property. Since Levinson fails to marshal a sin-
there are severe limitations on “novelty” that are not gle counterargument, his commentary makes no sub-
shared between languages. Although productivity is not stantive contribution on this point.
intertranslatability per se, the inadequacy of Hockett’s Next, Levinson claims that my statement about the
conception of productivity is shown by the specific re- Whorf hypothesis and formal theories is incoherent,
strictions on intertranslatability that we see in my paper. namely, that it is forced on formal theories just in case
Interestingly, however, this reconsideration of produc- a culture-language connection like Pirahã tenses is dis-
tivity implies that there are multiple kinds of human covered. Again, he does not say why. In fact, as I have
grammars. established in some detail (1993), according to universal
Wierzbicka’s comments revolve around two asser- grammar children’s core grammar is insulated from cul-
tions: (1) her theory requires all languages to have the tural influence, and therefore only a Whorfian hypothesis
quantifier “all” and (2) Pirahã does in fact have the word is acceptable.
“all.” Nothing she says, however, is relevant to deter- Levinson goes on to suggest that there is sustained
mining whether Pirahã has “all” or not. All semanticists bilingualism among the Pirahã, based on the statement
know that the quantificational properties of a word are in my paper that there has long been intermarriage be-
revealed by its truth conditions. I have pointed out that tween the Pirahã and outsiders. Here he misunderstands
Pirahã has no word with the truth conditions of universal my point, but this is surely my fault for not explaining
quantification. Unless Wierzbicka can show that I am “intermarriage” clearly enough. In the Pirahã case, in-
wrong about the truth conditions, she has no case. The termarriage does not imply cohabitation; it in fact im-
same applies to her assertions on the Pirahã pronomin- plies only sexual relations. There is no off-the-shelf an-
als. Further, her assertion that I have “primitivized” or thropological term that I am aware of for sexual relations
“exoticized” the Pirahã is based only on the idea that if that are partly casual and partly intended to produce chil-
the properties of the language do not agree with her the- dren with non-Pirahã fathers (children of non-Pirahã
ory it is primitive. But this is a nonsequitur. Finally, her women are never raised among the Pirahã, only children
point about “all” is not unique to her. From a much older of Pirahã women). In such cases the name of the Brazilian
tradition, Davidson says (2001[1997]:134–35) that the father—but a Pirahã name, not a Portuguese name—is
“last stage” in language development remembered. Sometimes, jokingly, the Brazilian may be

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644 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 4, August–October 2005

referred to as the Pirahã woman’s husband, though he dependently established in publications listed in the pa-
receives no loyalty, no favors, no relationship at all. per. Second, the claims are replicable—but only through
There is not and never has been any sustained cohabi- the Pirahã language.
tation between Pirahã and Brazilians or other ethnic
groups. There is certainly no bilingualism, sustained or
otherwise. Readers need not take my unsupported word
for this; Peter Ladefoged, who visited the Pirahãs with
me in 1995 to conduct phonetic research, had this to say
about them, after conducting field research on at least
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