Pirahã

Was halten wir denn davon?

Pirahã ist der Name einer vom gleichnamigen Stamm im Amazonasgebiet Brasiliens gesprochenen Sprache, die als die einzige heute noch gesprochene Sprache der Mura-Sprachfamilie gilt.

Pirahã hat seit 2005 eine große Debatte unter Linguisten ausgelöst, die auch ein beträchtliches Echo in den Medien erfahren hat. Grund dafür ist, dass Daniel L. Everett, der Linguist, der hauptsächlich mit der Sprache gearbeitet hat, behauptet, dass die Sprache in zahlreichen Punkten extrem ungewöhnlich ist und strukturell massiv von anderen, auch „exotischen“, Sprachen abweicht.

So, und jetzt...?

"ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR. [6.14.07]

Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf

There are a number of points worth emphasizing with respect to Dan Everett's claims about Pirahã. First, and most important, he is not claiming that Pirahã speakers are in any way limited in what they can say by the lack of recursion in the syntax. Saying 'John has a brother. His brother has a house' communicates the same content as 'John's brother's house', albeit with less perspicuous packaging. The fact that Pirahã speakers can formulate such utterances supports Everett's claim that they can form recursive semantic propositions, which are then expressed in this non-recursive way in the syntax. There are analogues in other languages. I worked for many years with speakers of Lakhota, the language of the Sioux, which definitely has recursive structures in its syntax. If one asked a Lakhota speaker if the Lakhota equivalent of 'I know that Bill stole the money', with 'that Bill stole the money' as an embedded clause, is a possible Lakhota sentence, he or she would say that it is. If, on the other hand, one asked a Lakhota speaker how he or she would say that sentence, they would respond 'Bill stole the money, and I know it', which is exactly the same kind of non-recursive structure found in Pirahã. Given a choice, the Lakhota speakers I have worked with always chose the non-recursive structure. There are good reasons why they would want to avoid such embedded clauses, given certain features of Lakhota syntax, but the point is that speakers find it to be communicatively equivalent to the recursive structure.

John Searle long ago proposed a principle of effability, which states that all languages are capable of expressing the same content. Despite the lack of recursion, Pirahã speakers are indeed able to express complex propositions. This is relevant to Chomsky's claim that recursion is the key feature of human language. Chomsky's approach treats syntax as the main backbone of language, to which other aspects of language are secondary. Because speakers are capable of formulating complex recursive propositions, this must, given Chomsky's view of the centrality and primacy of syntax to language, be realized in terms of recursion in the syntax."

Welche dieser Einlassungen sind überhaupt in ihrer gedanklichen Vagheit und Schwere widerlegbar? Oder zu testbaren Sätzen umzuformulieren?