Daniel Leonard Everett is an American linguist and author who gained prominence through his extensive research on the Pirahã people and their language in the Amazon basin. He is a Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Massachusetts. His 2005 article Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã argued that the Pirahã language lacks certain features considered universal to human languages, including recursive self-embedding structures, a claim that directly challenged Noam Chomskys theory of universal grammar and sparked significant controversy. He has also authored books exploring the relationship between language, culture and cognition, including Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle and Language: The Cultural Tool.
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Noam Chomsky, Linguists Everett fieldwork on Piraha, which he argued lacked recursion, was framed as a direct challenge to Chomsky universal-grammar claim that recursion is a linguistic universal.
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1. Wikipedia: Daniel Everett
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Daniel Leonard Everett (born July 26, 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language.
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is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon ba
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