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Language: The Cultural Tool Paperback – 22 Mar 2012

by
Daniel L. Everett (Author)
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Daniel L. Everett (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars 14 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Profile Books (22 Mar. 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9781846682674
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846682674
  • ASIN: 1846682673
  • Product Dimensions: 15.3 x 2.6 x 23.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 618,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

The most important - and provocative - anthropological field work ever undertaken (Tom Wolfe)

Controversial, driven by data from across the sciences, and leavened with wit - Language: The Cultural Tool is the book on language I have been waiting and waiting for. A masterpiece, and then some (Patricia S. Churchland)

A must-read for anyone having an interest in knowing what makes us human (Patricia S. Churchland)

The most recent and most eloquent account of a remarkable sea change that is taking place in our understanding of the nature of human language (Michael Corballis)

This is exciting work. I learned a tremendous amount from it, as will anyone who is concerned with the nature of language and of mind (Robert Brandom)

Thoughtfully reflecting on the communicative ecologies of the Amazonian peoples among whom he has lived and worked, Dan Everett mounts an impassioned argument that language has adaptively emerged as our species' "tool" for achieving social collectivity via discourse (Michael Silverstein)

A radical reassessment of the origin and evolution of language....The book eloquently reminds us that the incredible diversity of languages on this planet reflect different ways of thinking and being in the world - a phenomenon that might sadly be on the verge of extinction (Robert Greene)

A book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity ... A very rich but also very readable book (Brian Appleyard Sunday Times)

Revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language (Guardian)

Impressively modest and reasoned ... deserves a serious reading (Economist)

A very good read ... a most lively introduction (Times Higher Educational Supplement)

Book Description

A groundbreaking and controversial new theory about how we talk

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2.0 out of 5 starsDisappointingly basic
By kiki on 27 May 2012
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Perhaps my expectations were set too high, but "Language: The Cultural Tool" is written in a disappointingly simple way, aimed at people with little understanding of linguistics. The author often digresses and explains basic concepts at great length, while examples of utterances in Pirahã are not sufficiently analysed.

For instance, the example of three Pirahã sentences (?) that were supposed to show that Pirahã sentences are not recursive seems to contradict this very assumption, as each of the units the author considers a separate sentence indicates that the following unit is indirect speech in a different way, as if showing different layers of embedding for the final unit, which could just as well mean that the whole structure either is a sentence or is analogous to one, and that recursion does exist in Pirahã.

The author tries to prove that there is no universal grammar by showing how different (from English) the languages spoken by tribes living in the rainforest are. However, the sentences used as examples are translated literally and their structure is not sufficiently analysed. The author's ignorance of analogy, inability to consistently operate on the same concepts, amazement at morphology that is common in many widely used modern languages and presentation of any differences from English grammar as something very exotic made me very sceptical about the validity of his theories and analysis of the Pirahã language.
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4.0 out of 5 starsNurture not nature
By Clive P L Young on 18 Aug. 2012
Format: Paperback
An entertaining and convincing riposte both to Noam Chomsky's notion of 'universal grammar' which has dominated linguistics for decades and Steven Pinker's populist 'language instinct'. Both so-called 'nativist' theories claim the capacity and underlying language structure is somehow genetically 'programmed in' to the human brain, and that the difference between for example Japanese and German are so superficial to be hardly worth studying. Above all, Chomsky and Pinker argue that culture is of minimal importance to the structure of languages.

Everett refutes this almost completely, basing his case on his own decades-long fieldwork with the Pirahã people of the Amazon and the emerging evidence from a wide range of other researchers that culture is vitally important to language formation. Everett argues that language is a tool, highly adapted to a particular culture and well capable of having evolved from non-language cognitive skills. There was simply never any need to evolve a 'language instinct' and it is the actually the culturally-contextualised differences between languages, not their underlying similarities (which may be due more to basic cognitive processes than genetics anyway) that help us understand how human language works.

It is an enthralling and emotional tale, unfortunately often undermined by a sprawling structure that sometimes reads like the jumbled lecture notes of a rather good undergraduate course, complete with frequent repetitions for the slower student. The argument clearly wins on points but I felt needed a tighter, more focused approach to land a knock-out blow.
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5.0 out of 5 starsRead this book!
By Jackie Goulbourne on 1 May 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This book is incredibly interesting. I'm a linguistics student and it really filled in some of the gaps in my thinking about the possibility of linguistic innateism and the ontogenesis of language.

The tone of the book is very easy to understand and full of anecdotes, yet not dumbed down which is not easy to achieve! Loved this book and have recommended it to lots of my friends.
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4.0 out of 5 starsAcademic but very good
By RJS on 21 April 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This book is quite academic and so could be quite-hard going for people with no background in Lingusitics. However, it is very well written and the author has tried hard to make the subject matter accessible. It presents convincing arguments in favour of language being a cultural tool rather than an innate skill. Overall, it's well-worth ploughing through
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2.0 out of 5 starsA disappointing book
By Manmohan Bhaskar on 27 Dec. 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
As an anthropological linguist, the hype about this “revolutionary” book encouraged me to buy it. I have always hated the arm-chair “universal grammar” of the Chomskyan variety and always rejected “language as instinct” thesis in favour of “language as a cultural tool” and “language as social semiotic” theses. Some linguists have done excellent work to prove that there are no absolute linguistic universals, but Everett is not one of them. This book is disappointingly basic. Everett’s analysis of the Pirahã syntax is so basic and shallow that one starts doubting his central argument that there is no recursion in Pirahã syntax. There is interesting information about the culture of the Pirahã-speaking community and about the male and female speakers having slightly different phonological systems. But still as a linguist I find the book highly disappointing.
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2.0 out of 5 stars"Pirahã language: The Cultural Tool"
By S on 29 Jun. 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This book was an impulse buy after having seen it in my local Waterstone's. I'm very interested in language and linguistics, but I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this book.

I was pretty disappointed. In this book, Daniel Everett tries to explain... well, I'm not entirely sure what he tries to explain, the book isn't very well structured. The main argument seems to be "Chomsky is wrong" but, thankfully, he doesn't go about this in an aggressive "I'm right you're wrong" manner. His line of argument is that language is the product of culture, and the only reason that every human culture has language is that every human culture needs it; there is no genetic, neural or psychological predisposition for language.

He also tries to illustrate his arguments with many examples, 98% of which come from the Amazonian language Pirahã, which (as we are constantly reminded) Daniel Everett has studied for many years. This gets tiresome after a while, and if I wanted to learn everything about the Pirahã people, I would have bought Everett's other book.

The arguments do occasionally go over my head, and this is perhaps why I didn't enjoy the book as much as I could, and Everett's whole-hearted rejection of Chomskyan principles of universal grammar and linguistic nativism did make me somewhat uncomfortable.

On the whole, this book contained a few interesting nuggets of information, and it may be of help / limited interest to people who are interested in linguistics, but it's not very in depth, it's not structured very well and it's all about the Pirahã, so I wouldn't recommend it to people with anything less than a strong interest in the subject matter.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

love it

Published 2 months ago by Gordon Toumaniantz
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Arrived as described.

Published 8 months ago by Daniel Karczewski
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Fascinating. Set a few hours aside each time you dip into this!

Published 17 months ago by Fergus McClelland
5.0 out of 5 starsdefinitive

This book has done more to explain my speech problems, mainly due to severe traums to left base of my skull, than all doctors and previous information from all sources.

Published on 19 April 2014 by MR MICHAEL G EVERETT
4.0 out of 5 starsNot quite there but still enthraling

I enjoyed Everett's book but did feel similar to other reviewers in that it tends to constantly recap its theories. This leads to repetition. Read more

Published on 21 Nov. 2013 by James
5.0 out of 5 starsHello UG, this is reality speaking - Piraha.

A brilliantly written exposition of one of the discipline's most ambitious projects - an anthropological linguistic account of an amazing language, which, according to the claims... Read more

Published on 10 April 2013 by Johnn Dwyer
4.0 out of 5 starsFascinating but not a strong thread of argument

I am three-quarters of the way through this very absorbing book. It is packed with material about linguistics and the cultural element of language, most of which was new to me and... Read more

Published on 31 Mar. 2013 by J. Heritage
2.0 out of 5 starsWeakly argued, disappointing

I'm not a professional linguist, but I work with (and create) computational languages of the sort described by classical Chomskyan theory, and have many sympathies with it as a... Read more

Published on 12 Oct. 2012 by Thomas Beale

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