World Experts to Attend Linguistics Conference April 27-29 at Illinois State

Date: 4/24/07
Contact: Marc Lebovitz

Linguistics scholars from around the world will be brought together at Illinois State University this weekend by ISU Professor Dan Everett to engage in what is expected to be a heated debate over the findings of – Everett himself.

The April edition of The New Yorker includes a lengthy article about Everett’s linguistic research and the conclusions he has reached. Everett, who is the chair of Illinois State’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, for many years has studied the language of a remote Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã. His research throws into question assumptions about how humans acquire language that have been commonly accepted by scholars for over half a century.

Among the speakers at the April 27 to 29 Recursion in Human Languages Conference to be held in various rooms of Bone Student Center will be a welcome from Bernard Comrie, director of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the conference co-sponsor with Illinois State. Others will come from around the United States as well as Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Great Britain.

Everett, who was inspired as a teenager by fictional linguist Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady,” later met a family of missionaries who worked in a tribal village in Brazil. Through them, he eventually enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to begin missionary work in the Amazon. Later he completed his Sc.D. in Linguistics at the University of Campina (UNICAMP).

It was through SIL and his work at UNICAMP that Everett became involved with the Pirahã people, a hunter-gatherer society of approximately 350 people. Since beginning his work in the Amazon, Everett has lived in jungle villages for more than seven years and has conducted field research every year since 1977.