[3131s]

One of the reasons Everett is talked about so much is because his claims are controversial. Many linguists have criticized his methodologies. I have a background in linguistics but have never looked into Everett's work too thoroughly, but from what I have seen I am skeptical of his claims that Piraha lacks recursion. Still, an interesting line of inquiry and it would be nice if there were enough linguists to actually generate a wide body of research on the many endangered and minority languages. As it stands now, most languages are dying out almost completely undocumented.

[panglott]

AIUI, the controversy was generated based on definitions within generative linguistics that were ambiguous; the Chomskyans clarified what they meant by "recursion" for their purposes, and the controversy should have evaporated. That didn't stop the Chomskyans from getting Everett barred from conducting research among his friends the Pirahã or documenting their language. http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poiso...

If I had to boil it down to a sentence, Everett's claim ultimately was not that the Pirahã can't think recursively, it's that their language reflects a cultural aversion to referring to things that aren't concretely present, and this impacted their grammar for subordinating clauses.

OTOH, and quite separate from the recursion issue, there has been some really interesting research on Pirahã perception of number. The ScienceDirect link/paper in the parent is well worth your time; it's also here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a... and background at LanguageLog http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341

[jcranmer]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857 has the best summary of the affair. Several of the principles even show up in the comments.

The short of it is that Chomskyan hypothesis has a giant edifice built upon a single central idea. A fraca in popular science (i.e., outside academic journals) arises between Chomsky and Pinker over these ideas. Some unknown researcher announces that his obscure language brings the whole edifice crashing down. Add in a touch of Sapir-Whorf to make accusations of racism credible, and Chomsky's well-known fondness for dismissing critics rather than engaging them in scholarly debate.

Basically, there were two debates (did Pirahã have recursion in the sense that Everett meant? and what constitutes proof or disproof of universal grammar?) that went on simultaneously, while someone apparently took the opportunity to smear Everett with the Pirahã study ban.