Phoneme inventory

When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.

Kinship terms

Everett (2005) says that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture.^[6] A single word, baíxi (pronounced [màíʔì]), is used for both mother and father (like English "parent" although Pirahã has no gendered alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.

Numerals and grammatical number

According to Everett in 1986, Pirahã has words for 'one' (hói) and 'two' (hoí), distinguished only by tone. In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett said that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses.

In one, ten spools of thread were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for 'one' and 'two' in this experiment, uniformly using hói for one spool, hoí for two spools, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two spools.

The second experiment, however, started with ten spools of thread on the table, and spools were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used hói (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six spools left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three spools left. Though Frank and his colleagues do not attempt to explain their subjects' difference in behavior in these two experiments, they conclude that the two words under investigation "are much more likely to be relative or comparative terms like 'few' or 'fewer' than absolute terms like 'one'".

There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns.

A 2012 documentary aired on the Smithsonian Channel reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. As a consequence, observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity (which has a singular treatment in Pirahã language) became impossible, because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results.^[7]

Color terms

There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any unique color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark.^{[lower-alpha 1][8]} Although the Pirahã glossary in Daniel Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of color words (p. 354), Everett (2006) now says that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases (such as "(like) blood" for "red").^[9]

Pronouns

The basic Pirahã personal pronouns are ti "I, we", gi or gíxai [níʔàì] "you", hi "(s)he, they, this". These can be serially combined: ti gíxai or ti hi to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive), and gíxai hi to mean "you (plural)", or combined with xogiáagaó 'all', as in "we (all) go".

There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns, and they cannot be used independently the way the three basic pronouns can. The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar. In two recent papers, Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his (Everett's) analysis of the pronouns.

Sheldon (1988) gives the following list of pronouns:

Pronouns are prefixed to the verb, in the order SUBJECT-INDOBJECT-OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition "to", "for", etc. They may all be omitted, e.g., hi³-ti³-gi¹xai³-bi²i³b-i³ha³i¹ "he will send you to me".

For possession, a pronoun is used in apposition (zero-marking):

Thomason & Everett (2001) note the pronouns are formally close to those of the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenharim, which the Mura had once used as contact languages:

Both the Tupian and Pirahã third-person pronouns can be used as demonstratives, as in Pirahã hi xobaaxai ti "I am really smart" (lit. "This one sees well: me"). Given the restricted set of Pirahã phonemes, the Pirahã pronouns ti and gi are what one would expect if the Tupian pronouns were borrowed, and hi differs only in dropping the a.

Verbs

Pirahã is agglutinative, using a large number of affixes to communicate grammatical meaning. Even the 'to be' verbs of existence or equivalence are suffixes in Pirahã. For instance, the Pirahã sentence "there is a paca there" uses just two words; the copula is a suffix on "paca":

Pirahã also uses suffixes that communicate evidentiality, a category lacking in English grammar. One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question:

(The suffix -sai turns a verb into a noun, like English '-ing'.)

Other verbal suffixes indicate that an action is deduced from circumstantial evidence, or based on hearsay. Unlike in English, in Pirahã speakers must state their source of information: they cannot be ambiguous. There are also verbal suffixes that indicate desire to perform an action, frustration in completing an action, or frustration in even starting an action.

There are also a large number of verbal aspects: perfective (completed) vs. imperfective (uncompleted), telic (reaching a goal) vs. atelic, continuing, repeated, and commencing. However, despite this complexity, there appears to be little distinction of transitivity. For example, the same verb, xobai, can mean either 'look' or 'see', and xoab can mean either 'die' or 'kill'.

The verbs are, however, zero-marked, with no grammatical agreement with the arguments of the verb.^[10]

According to Sheldon (1988), the Pirahã verb has eight main suffix-slots, and a few sub-slots:

Slot A:

intensive ba³i¹

Ø

Slot B:

causative/incompletive bo³i¹

causative/completive bo³ga¹

inchoative/incompletive ho³i¹

inchoative/completive hoa³ga¹

future/somewhere a²i³p.

future/elsewhere a²o³p

past a²o³b

Ø

Slot C:

negative/optative sa³i¹ + C1

Slot C1:

preventive ha³xa³

opinionated ha³

possible Ø

positive/optative a³a¹ti³

negative/indicative hia³b + C2

positive/indicative Ø + C2

Slot C2:

declarative a¹

probabilistic/certain i³ha³i¹

probabilistic/uncertain/beginning a³ba³ga³i¹

probabilistic/uncertain/execution a³ba³i¹

probabilistic/uncertain/completion a³a¹

stative i²xi³

interrogative1/progressive i¹hi¹ai¹

interrogative2/progressive o¹xoi¹hi¹ai¹

interrogative1 i¹hi¹

interrogative2 o¹xoi¹hi¹

Ø

Slot D:

continuative xii³g

repetitive ta³

Ø

Slot E:

immediate a¹ha¹

intentive i³i¹

Ø

Slot F:

durative a³b

Ø

Slot G:

desiderative so³g

Ø

Slot H:

causal ta³i¹o³

conclusive si³bi³ga³

emphatic/reiterative koi + H1

emphatic ko³i¹ + H1

reiterative i³sa³ + H1

Ø + H1

Slot H1:

present i³hi¹ai³

past i³xa¹a³ga³

pastImmediate a³ga³ha¹

These suffixes undergo some phonetic changes depending on context. For instance, the continuative xii³g reduces to ii³g after a consonant, e.g., ai³t-a¹b-xii³g-a¹ → ai³ta¹bii³ga¹ "he is still sleeping".

Also an epenthetic vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant-cluster; the vowel is either i³ (before or after s, p, or t) or a³ (other cases), e.g., o³ga³i¹ so³g-sa³i¹ → o³ga³i¹ so³gi³sa³i¹ "he possibly may not want a field".

Conversely, when the junction of two morphemes creates a double vowel (ignoring tones), the vowel with the lower tone is suppressed: si³-ba¹-bo³-ga³-a¹ → si³ba¹bo³ga¹ "he caused the arrow to wound it".

For further details, see Sheldon's 1988 paper.

Embedding

Everett originally claimed that in order to embed one clause within another, the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the -sai suffix seen above:

The examples of embedding were limited to one level of depth, so that to say "He really knows how to talk about making arrows", more than one sentence would be needed.

Everett has also concluded that because Pirahã does not have number-words for counting, does not allow recursive adjective-lists like "the green wealthy hunchbacked able golfer", and does not allow recursive possessives like "The child's friend's mother's house", a Pirahã sentence must have a length limit. This leads to the additional conclusion that there is a finite number of different possible sentences in Pirahã with any given vocabulary.

Everett has also recently reinterpreted even the limited form of embedding in the example above as parataxis. He now states that Pirahã does not admit any embedding at all, not even one level deep. He says that words that appear to form a clause in the example are actually a separate unembedded sentence, which, in context, expresses the same thought that would be expressed by a clause in English. He gives evidence for this based on the lack of specialized words for clause-formation, the pattern of coreferring tokens in the purported clause-constructions, and examples where the purported clause is separated from the rest of the sentence by other complete sentences.

Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences.^[11]

According to Everett the statement that Pirahã is a finite language without embedding and without recursion presents a challenge for proposals by Noam Chomsky and others concerning universal grammar—on the grounds that if these proposals are correct, all languages should show evidence of recursive (and similar) grammatical structures.

Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language.^[12]

However, as Everett points out, the language can have recursion in ideas, with some ideas in a story being less important than others. He also mentions a paper from a recursion conference in 2005 describing recursive behaviors in deer as they forage for food. So to him, recursion can be a brain property that humans have developed more than other animals. He points out that the criticism of his conclusions uses his own doctoral thesis to refute his knowledge and conclusions drawn after a subsequent twenty-nine years of research.^[11]

Everett's observation that the language does not allow recursion has also been vigorously disputed by other linguists,^[1] who call attention to data and arguments from Everett's own previous publications, which interpreted the "-sai" construction as embedding. Everett has responded that his earlier understanding of the language was incomplete and slanted by theoretical bias. He now says that the morpheme -sai attached to the main verb of a clause merely marks the clause as 'old information', and is not a nominalizer at all (or a marker of embedding).^[13] More recently, the German linguist Uli Sauerland of the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft at Humboldt University (Berlin) has performed a phonetic reanalysis of experimental data in which Pirahã speakers were asked to repeat utterances by Everett. Sauerland reports that these speakers make a tonal distinction in their use of "-sai" that "provides evidence for the existence of complex clauses in Pirahã".^[14]