Everett speaks on Dark Matter of the Mind, performs monolingual demo

Professor Dan Everett, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University and renowned expert on the Amazonian language Piraha, gave a talk, "Grammar and the Culturally Articulated Unconscious", in the Institute of Cognitive Science colloquium series on September 25. This event was jointly sponsored by Linguistics and the Institute of Cognitive Science. In the afternoon, he performed a monolingual fieldwork demonstration in the Department of Linguistics. The demo involved a language that was unknown to Everett. Everett and the language teacher did not use a common language during the session. The language used by the teacher was later revealed to be Lamnso, a language spoken by the Nso people of Northwest Cameroon.

Abstract

In this talk, I outline a theory of the formation of dark matter/tacit knowledge of the mind, via apperceptions, languaging, and culturing, drawing the bulk of my data from Piraha, a language isolate of the Brazilian Amazon that I have studied intensively. Among the lessons that Piraha has to teach us about human language and the mind, two are highlighted here. The first is that not all human syntactic systems are equally complex. The second is that culture may exercise an architectonic effect on the final form of phonology, syntax, and other aspects of the grammar, and cognition more generally.  The conclusion I draw from these lessons is that the idea of an innate, universal grammar has passed its sell-by date. UG has little if any role to play in our understanding of the nature, origins, and use of human language. This work draws heavily from my  forthcoming book: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (U of Chicago Press, 2016)