Futrell Richard, Stearns Laura, Everett Daniel L, Piantadosi Steven T, Gibson Edward
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.
Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 2;11(3):e0145289. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145289. eCollection 2016.
The Pirahã language has been at the center of recent debates in linguistics, in large part because it is claimed not to exhibit recursion, a purported universal of human language. Here, we present an analysis of a novel corpus of natural Pirahã speech that was originally collected by Dan Everett and Steve Sheldon. We make the corpus freely available for further research. In the corpus, Pirahã sentences have been shallowly parsed and given morpheme-aligned English translations. We use the corpus to investigate the formal complexity of Pirahã syntax by searching for evidence of syntactic embedding. In particular, we search for sentences which could be analyzed as containing center-embedding, sentential complements, adverbials, complementizers, embedded possessors, conjunction or disjunction. We do not find unambiguous evidence for recursive embedding of sentences or noun phrases in the corpus. We find that the corpus is plausibly consistent with an analysis of Pirahã as a regular language, although this is not the only plausible analysis.
皮拉罕语一直是近期语言学辩论的焦点，很大程度上是因为据称它不表现出递归性，而递归性被认为是人类语言的一个普遍特征。在此，我们对最初由丹·埃弗雷特和史蒂夫·谢尔登收集的皮拉罕语自然语料库进行了分析。我们将该语料库免费提供以供进一步研究。在该语料库中，皮拉罕语句子已进行了浅层句法分析，并给出了词素对齐的英文翻译。我们利用该语料库通过寻找句法嵌入的证据来研究皮拉罕语句法的形式复杂性。具体而言，我们寻找那些可被分析为包含中心嵌入、句子补足语、状语、补语词、嵌入式所有格、连词或析取词的句子。我们在语料库中未找到句子或名词短语递归嵌入的明确证据。我们发现该语料库似乎与将皮拉罕语分析为正则语言的观点一致，尽管这并非唯一合理的分析。
