In Tom Wolfe's 'Kingdom,' Speech Is The One Weird Trick

[Jim__]

12. A reply to Wolfe's mocking essay.

In the LTE column for Harper's October 2016 issue, Professor Pesetsky replies to some of Wolfe's criticisms.

An excerpt:

Tom Wolfe paints a florid and darkly conspiratorial picture of a decade-old discussion in linguistics, in which my colleagues and I are as-signed the role of bad guys [“The Ori-gins of Speech,” Essay, August]. The dispute concerns Daniel Everett’s as-sertion that Pirahã, an indigenous Brazilian language, has unique fea-tures that overturn a supposed lin-guistic orthodoxy attributed to Noam Chomsky. I was one of three authors of a 2009 paper that weighed in against Everett’s claims, a paper extensively discussed by Wolfe in dramatically negative terms (“a swollen corpus of objections—cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between&quot .

There is so much to object to in Wolfe’s narrative. There is the name-calling and over-the-top rhetoric (“Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky&quot . There are the many passages in which Wolfe purports to know my private thoughts and those of my colleagues, despite having made no effort to contact us for interviews. There is the descrip-tion of my department at MIT as a den of “modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts"—contrasting, apparently, with the genuinely manly field linguistics practiced by Everett. (Many of my MIT colleagues and students are women, by the way, and some of them are fieldworkers.)

But the most important shortcoming of Wolfe’s essay is his misrepresentation of the scientific issues at stake. In a 2005 paper, Everett argued that the Pirahã language lacked subordinate clauses (“Mary said that it is raining&quot and the ability to nest possessors inside of other possessors (“Mary’s canoe’s motor is big&quot , along with a few other properties. He further maintained that these “gaps" contradicted a theory about language that he attributed to Chomsky. Puzzled by the apparent weakness of the evidence presented for these claims and the significance alleged for them, Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues, and I decided to investigate. In his own previous papers, we found blatant counterexamples to Everett’s claims, which he had left not only unexplained but unmentioned, and we argued that many of the supposedly unique properties of Pirahã had precedents in other languages of the world.

Crucially, we also pointed out that even if Everett’s new factual claims about Pirahã were correct, they would have no bearing whatsoever on the issues that he believed his work addressed because he misrepresented those issues. Chomsky has never proposed that every language must have subordinate clauses, nested possessors, or any other specific grammatical construction. All linguists know that languages vary in the constructions they allow and disallow, and the principles that underlie this variation constitute one of the main topics of our field. In the Science paper that Everett cited repeatedly for the assertion that every language must have subordinate clauses, Chomsky and his co-authors actually said nothing of the sort, mentioning subordinate clauses only as an illustrative example in a broader discussion of the human capacity for hierarchically organized phrase structure.

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