Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (30 page)

Row two of the table symbolizes the Sapir-Whorf research tradition, which looks at the grammar-cognition interface from the perspective of how grammar, that is, the way our languages are structured, might affect the way we think.

For the third row, the names that come to mind are Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, both emeritus professors of the University of California at Berkeley. Their work purports to show that all cultures’ classification of colors follows restrictions imposed by the human brain’s physical constraints for recognizing tints, hues, and relative brilliance of colors. This cerebral-cognitive limitation imposes constraints on the classification of colors in all cultures.

Row four represents the perspective of linguistic anthropologists like Greg Urban of the University of Pennsylvania. Urban’s work makes the case that language can affect culture in interesting and subtle ways. One of the examples he discusses concerns the effect of passive (such as
John was seen by Bill
) versus active (
Bill saw John
) grammatical constructions on the concept of the hero in different societies.

Urban claims that in some languages the proportion of passive clauses may be much higher in natural oral or written discourse than active clauses, while in other languages active sentences may occur much more frequently. He further makes a case that when passives are the more natural and most frequent type of construction, heroes discussed in discourses will be perceived more naturally as having things done to them rather than initiating actions. These heroes will be perceived as having more passive personalities than the heroes of languages where active sentences predominate.

In the case of a language without passive constructions, we would encounter sentences like
The man killed the jaguar
and
The jaguar killed
the man,
but not
The man was killed by the jaguar.
When an action is performed, the one doing the action is central to the telling of the story.

On the other hand, in a language that favors passive constructions the one doing the action is less central to the story. For example, if we compare closely the active versus passive contrasts of examples like
The man killed the jaguar
and
The jaguar was killed by the man
(or, even more likely in a passive construction,
The jaguar was killed
) occurring time and time again in stories, we would soon realize that in the passive, the role of “the man” is reduced in centrality. What becomes central is the object of the action, here “the jaguar,” and not the subject or doer of the action. Such contrasts can work hand in hand with the culture to produce either heroes that are central to the telling of stories or stories in which doers of action are not so crucial, not so central, and, hence, not so heroic.

Since Pirahã lacks passive constructions, its principal characters in stories, like the panther story, are active initiators of actions and much more heroic than their counterparts in languages that favor passives. (I will not give an example of the latter, since I am only offering a simple summary of Urban’s theory. In fact, I think examples of languages like this might be more complicated than this theory suspects.) In any case, this underscores how crucial it is to study language and culture together, rather than in isolation. Like my own work—though from the opposite direction—this goes against the traditions of both modern linguistics and much of modern anthropology.

Row five represents the research that investigates how culture can affect cognition. The Pirahã case is a good example. Pirahã’s lack of counting is a result of cultural constraints, as we discussed earlier. But this cultural by-product has cognitive effects—Pirahã adults find it nearly impossible to learn to count after a lifetime spent in a numberless environment.

Finally, the last row in the table represents the research that others, including me, are doing on local and global effects of cultural values on sentence formation, word structure, and sound structure. This is controversial work too and also goes against much received knowledge in linguistics. It is what the immediacy of experience principle, for example, is trying to get at.

15                  Recursion: Language as a Matrioshka Doll

T
heories affect our perceptions. They are part of the cultural information that constrains the way we see the world around us. There are many examples of culture-perception connections that don’t involve science but which illustrate my point, such as the time I mistook an anaconda for a floating log. My culture told me to look for logs when traveling by boat (universally good advice!). And it gave me information on what floating logs look like in a river. But it didn’t have anything to tell me about what very large anacondas look like swimming toward you.

We were traveling out of the village in our own motorboat, all the way to Humaitá to catch the bus to Pôrto Velho. Keren had made tuna sandwiches with homemade bread and we had Kool-Aid to drink. As I piloted the boat down the Maici and then the Marmelos, everyone was relaxed. Shannon was reading the Brazilian comic book
Monica
while the others dozed or watched the scenery go by.

We came to my favorite part of the entire trip, the
encontro das aguas,
where the dark green water of the Marmelos meets the chocolate-milk-colored water of the Madeira. I shouted for everyone to look and we all watched as the two colors of water ran for a bit side by side, then we saw swirls of muddy water in the green water, then finally the green water was absorbed, about five hundred yards past the mouth.

I then turned my attention upriver, as we skirted the island that sits at the mouth of the Marmelos, motoring toward the Auxiliadora, where we would spend the night. The Madeira River is so named for the trees that are washed from its muddy banks and float down it toward the Amazon. There are huge trunks and branches in the river, especially dangerous when they float invisibly just beneath the surface. About two hundred yards upriver I saw a log floating in the fast current. It was twisted. When I first began to travel the Amazon system, I expected to see new things in this new world, so I mistook every log in the river for a snake, because the water makes wood seem to undulate. This log seemed to undulate as well, though by now I knew enough not to mistake it for a snake. And I also knew that snakes were not as big as logs. This one, as I watched it more closely, was perhaps forty feet long and three feet thick.

I shifted to look at two macaws flying and squawking overhead. Then I looked back at the log. It was closer to us now. Strange, I thought, the log is floating toward the bank, perpendicular to the current.

Then as it got closer, I saw that it really was undulating. Suddenly it came straight toward my end of the boat. This was no log. This was the largest anaconda I had ever seen. Its head was larger than mine. Its body was much thicker than mine and over thirty feet long. It opened its mouth wide and swam toward me. I swerved sharply, throwing my family to the side hard, and I managed to hit the snake with the propeller of my 15-horsepower outboard motor as it dove under the boat.
Thud.
A solid hit. I thought I had hit it in the head, but I wasn’t sure.

The snake disappeared. Then a second later the entire snake’s body stood up out of the water, towering above the boat, but receding behind us as we pressed forward, at about ten miles per hour. I looked at the entire length of the snake’s whitish underbelly as it fell backward with a loud, large splash into the Madeira River.

I didn’t know anacondas could to that, I thought. That damned thing could have jumped in the boat with us!

I was just staring. Shannon looked up now from her comic and said “Wow!”

This experience of mistaken perception taught me what psychologists have long known: perception is learned. We perceive the world, both as theoreticians and as citizens of the universe, according to our experiences and expectations, not always, perhaps even never, according to how the world actually is.

A
s I became more fluent in Pirahã, I began to harbor a suspicion that the people were keeping their speech simple for my sake. When they spoke to me, the sentences seemed short, with only one verb each. So I decided that it would be worth listening more carefully to how they spoke to one another, rather than basing my conclusions on how they spoke to me. My best opportunity, I knew, would come from Báígipóhoái, Xahoábisi’s wife. Each morning she talked loudly, beginning around five o’clock, sitting up in her hut in the dark, with Xahoábisi getting the fire going strong, only a few feet from my bedroom. She spoke to the entire village about what she had dreamed. She asked people by name what they were going to do that day. She told men leaving in canoes what kind of fish to catch, where the best places to fish were, how foreigners could be best avoided, and on and on. She was the village crier and gossip rolled into one. She was enjoyable to listen to. There was a certain artistry to her discourse, with her deep voice, the range of intonation in her talk (from very low to very high and back down again), the stylistically different way she pronounced her words—as if breath were going into her lungs and mouth rather than coming out. If ever there was a speaker that was speaking Pirahã for Pirahãs and not for me, the linguist, Báígi was it. Important for me, as I recorded then transcribed her sentences, they were structured identically to the sentences spoken to me by Kóhoi and other teachers—just one verb each.

This was especially challenging, since in my analysis of Pirahã grammar, I tried hard to collect examples where one phrase or sentence occurred inside another, as any linguist would, since such structures are supposed to reveal the grammar better than the simple sentences I was collecting. I began by looking for sentences like
The man who caught the fish is in the house,
where a sentence-like relative clause (
who caught the fish
) occurs within a noun phrase (
The man . . .
), which occurs within another sentence (
The man is in the house
). At the time, I believed that relative clauses existed in all languages.

In trying to figure out whether or not Pirahã had relative clauses, I decided to ask Kóhoi one day to tellme if I was “talking pretty”when I said, “The man came into the house. He was tall.” These are two simple sentences. In English, though, we would prefer to put the second sentence inside the former, to get a relative clause—“The man who was tall came into the house.” When I asked the Pirahã men whether my speech was pretty or not, usually they would say yes, to avoid rudeness. But then, if I had in fact expressed myself poorly, they would repeat the sentence I had mangled back to me in correct Pirahã, without ever telling me I was wrong. I was therefore hoping when I asked this particular question that Kóhoi would utter a corrective sentence and say something like “The man who is tall came into the house.” But, no, Kóhoi just said I was speaking pretty and repeated the phrases after me just as I had said them originally, something that the Pirahãs rarely do if the grammar is incorrect.

I experimented with various sentences using several different Pirahã teachers. All would either answer that I was speaking pretty or say “
Xaió!
” (Correct!)

So in a draft section of my Pirahã grammar about relative clauses I wrote that there were none in the language. But then one day Kóhoi was making a fishing arrow and needed a nail for the tip.

He spoke to his son, Paitá:
“Ko Paitá, tapoá xigaboopaáti. Xoogiai hi goo tapoá xoáboi. Xaisigíai”
(Hey Paitá, bring back some nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same).

I heard this and it stopped me in my tracks. I realized that these phrases were functioning together like a single sentence with a relative clause and that they could even be translated as such a sentence in En glish, but that their form was significantly different. They were three separate sentences, not one sentence with another sentence inside of it as in English. This Pirahã construction therefore lacked a relative clause in the sense that linguists usually mean. Crucially, the last sentence,
Xaisigíai
(They are the same), equated the word
nails
from the first two sentences. In English we would say, “Bring back
the nails that Dan bought
” (I have italicized the relative clause portion). I was thus seeing the separate clauses interpreted together even though they were not part of the same sentence. So there was a way of producing something like a relative clause in meaning, even if there were no relative clauses proper.

A sentence to most linguists is the expression in words of a proposition, an unspoken unit of meaning that represents a single thought, such as
I ate, John saw Bill,
or a single state, such as
The ball is red, I have a hammer,
and so on. Most languages not only have simple sentences like these, though, but they also have a way of putting one sentence or one phrase inside of another. This matrioshka-doll characteristic is known as recursion by computer scientists, linguists, psychologists, and philosophers. This issue is currently setting linguistics, philosophy of language, anthropology, and psychology ablaze, in a debate on the potential significance of Pirahã’s grammar for the understanding of humans and their languages.

In this respect, the evidence I was collecting was beginning to build support for two ideas I later came to hold about Pirahã sentence structure. The first was that Pirahã sentences lacked recursion. The second idea was that recursion wasn’t all that important—apparently, whatever you could say with recursion in one language, you could say without it in another. Linguists have long believed, though not always using the same terminology, that recursion is very important in language. And so I knew that any evidence that Pirahã could bring to bear on the issue would be important.

Chomsky was one of the first to ask how humans could produce so many sentences, an unbounded number, with only finite brains. There must be some tool available to allow us to make, as the common linguistics saying goes, “infinite use of finite means” (though I don’t think any linguist could really provide a coherent story of what that expression really means in scientific terms). Chomsky claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion.

Recursion has traditionally been defined as the ability to put one item inside another of the same type (for the more mathematically inclined, it is a function with a procedure or a subroutine whose implementation references itself). A visual form of recursion occurs when you hold a mirror up to a mirror and see an infinite regress of mirrors in the reflection. And an auditory form of recursion is feedback, the squeal from an amplifier picking up and continuing to amplify its own output over and over.

These are the standard definitions of recursion. In syntax, again, this would translate into putting one unit inside another unit of the same type. Take a phrase like
John’s brother’s son,
which contains the noun phrases
John, his brother,
and
his son.
And a sentence like
I said that you are ugly
contains the sentence
you are ugly.

In 2002, in the journal
Science,
Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch placed a great burden on recursion by labeling it the unique component of human language. They claimed that recursion is the key to the creativity of language, in that as a grammar possesses this formal device, it can produce an infinite number of sentences of unbounded length.

However, as word has reached the scientific world of my claim that Pirahã lacks recursion in the mathematical, matrioshka-doll sense, a curious thing has happened. The definition of recursion has changed among some followers of Chomsky. In a sense this is an example of something the philosopher Richmond Thomason used to say to people who changed their mind on some subjects: “If at first you don’t succeed, redefine success.”

The newest definition of recursion to emerge from Chomsky’s school makes recursion a form of compositionality. Simply put, it says that you can put parts together to make something new and you can do that endlessly. Under this novel notion of recursion, which is not accepted by any mathematical linguists or computer scientists that I know of, if I can put words together to form a sentence, that is recursion, and if I can put sentences together to form a story, that is recursion.

My own reaction to this is that it errs by conflating reasoning with language. People clearly can put sentences together and then interpret them as a whole story. But this is the same ability crime scene investigators use when they interpret apparently disparate bits of evidence and assemble them into a story of how the crime was committed. This is not language, it is reasoning. Yet the major appeal of Chomskyan theory for most scientists is that it has separated reasoning and language, and in particular that Chomsky has distinguished the structure of stories from the structure of sentences and phrases. He has claimed many times that stories and sentences are put together by very different principles. So failing to draw that distinction in this new notion of recursion is, ironically, inconsistent with Chomsky’s own theory but consistent with mine.