News
Florian Wolf & Ted Gibson’s book on discourse.
Buy it at MIT Press:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10908
Endorsements:
"In its biggest step forward since Aristotle, research on discourse structure has come down to earth by combining analysis of real-world text corpora with data about human readers. Wolf and Gibson's book documents and advances the state of our knowledge in today's liveliest area of linguistic analysis."
--Mark Liberman, Director, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
"An extensive analysis of discourse coherence that is at once theoretically motivated and empirically driven, with demonstrated applications to problems in both computational linguistics and psycholinguistics."
--Andrew Kehler, Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
The Pirahã in the News
There has been a lot of recent controversy surrounding a small tribe in the Amazonian forest in Brazil: the Pirahã. Intrigued by some of the claims about the Pirahã’s cognition and culture, our lab recently started a collaboration with Dan Everett, a linguist and an anthropologist who has been living on and off with the Pirahã since the late 70’s. Some papers describing the experiments we conducted in Brazil in Jan 2007 are on the way (stay tuned).
Dan Everett gave a talk at MIT on December 1, 2006.
Here is a copy of the handout from the talk:
Handout linkHere is the audio recording (requires Windows Media Player):
Recording linkDan Everett also organized a conference on Recursion in Human Languages that took place in Normal, IL in April 2007. Proceedings of the conference will be published in a special issue of The Linguistic Review. Stay tuned.
An article about Dan Everett and his life in the Pirahã village appeared in the April issue of the New Yorker.
Finally, there has been a lot of discussion about the Pirahã on the Language Log and on The Edge.
