Bentley Dean Highlighted in Tom Wolfe Book on Modern Linguistics

WALTHAM, MA – Bentley University educator Dr. Daniel Everett has been a celebrated linguistic anthropologist for decades, but he arrived on Noam Chomsky's radar when he challenged the latter's law of "recursion" in a 2005 essay.

The rivalry between Everett, Dean of Arts and Sciences and Co-Provost at Bentley, and Chomsky is highlighted in author Tom Wolfe's tome on modern linguistics, "The Kingdom of Speech."

According to Wolfe, Chomsky devised the law of recursion along with two colleagues in 2002. Recursion, Chomsky argued, is putting one sentence or thought into a series that, in theory, could be infinite.

Chomsky's assertion that recursion was a consistent theme throughout all human languages was shattered when Everett penned an essay in 2005 about the Pirahã tribe in Brazil's Amazonian basin, Wolfe writes.

Everett affirmed that the Pirahã had no recursion and had shaped their language through their unique culture, thus relegating Chomsky's law to a commonality among most languages, according to an excerpt from Wolfe's book printed in Harpers Magazine.

This controversy spanned years, with many painting Everett as the folk hero, fully immersed in the cultures he studied, as opposed to Chomsky the academic, Wolfe writes.

Speaking to the Bentley University News, Everett described Wolfe's interest in his work as "a gift." He said he hopes people find his work interesting and delve into the history of humanity's ancestors inventing language hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Everett himself has a book coming out this fall, "Dark Matter of the Mind," about culture's impact on cognitive instinct.

Photo: KristenN2013 (Own work), CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

>>>Read the full excerpt from Wolfe's book here.