From Cartesianism to Peircean Pragmatism – A Personal Journey

Dan Everett (f. 1951, Bentley University) er en amerikansk lingvist, som er velkendt for sit livslange arbejde med Amazonas-sproget pirahã. I udgivelse efter udgivelse har han beskrevet både dette sprogs fonologi, grammatik og leksikon, og på denne basis har han bidraget væsentligt til typologisk teori. Han har bl.a. betonet vigtigheden af ikke at adskille sprogbeskrivelsen fra sprogets kulturelle basis. Dette har i de senere år ført hans interesse i retning af sprogfilosofi og sprogets semiotiske funktion. Det er denne bevægelse fra typologisk teori til tanker om sprogets væsen som Dan Everett vil fortælle om i Lingvistkredsen.

Man kan læse mere om Dan Everett på hans private hjemmeside, hans universitetsside og i dette interview af to lingvistikstuderende fra Århus Universitet. 

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Abstract

Beginning my linguistic field research in the 1970s in southern Mexico and the northwestern Brazilian Amazon, I largely followed the models presented in my graduate education in the USA and Brazil. Although my first linguistic professor was Kenneth Pike, the founder of Tagmemics and a pragmatist himself, I was less influenced initially by his work than by the work of Noam Chomsky. My M.A. thesis was on phonology and phonetics, as were most of my early publications. I then completed an ScD dissertation on syntax and many syntax publications followed. However, all of this early work began to feel artificial to me in the sense that it failed to show the interconnectedness I detected between culture, sounds, grammar, meaning, and language use. This led me to anthropology. But even the anthropological connections in language were insufficient - I wanted to get at the conceptual roots of what I was seeing. I thus turned gradually to semiotics, in particular the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and his larger philosophy of Pragmatism/Pragmaticism. In fact my books follow this thought progression: from two theses on formal linguistics to an autobiographical ethnography  (Don’t sleep, there are snakes), to a book on grammar and culture (Language: The Cultural Tool), to a theory of culture and cognition (Dark Matter of the Mind), to a theory of language origins in culture and semiosis (How Language Began), to my current projects Peircean Linguistics (OUP) and American Aristotle (a biography of C.S. Peirce for Princeton U Press).