Andrew Ira Nevins, David Pesetsky, Cilene Rodrigues: “Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment”. ms, March 2007.

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirah is exceptional in displaying “inexplicable gaps”, that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to “immediate experience”, and that this principle has “severe” consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical “gaps” supposedly characteristic of Pirah are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world’s languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirah lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirah. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirah lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirah constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirah. Finally, following mostly Gonalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirah culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the “immediate experience” restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirah grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a “severe” one.