1057: Recursion in Pirahã Oct 31, 2017

Because people can add on new information to a sentence or clauses with adjuncts or subordinate clauses as well as other modifiers, theoretically anyway, a sentence in English could go on forever and there is an infinite number of possible sentences, even though there are a finite number of words. This is the case for very nearly every language, except (at least) one, Pirahã, which is quite famous for being different in a number of ways to most. In addition to having an incredibly small phoneme inventory and not having words for numbers, Pirahã also does not allow for recursion for strings of adjectives into serials like in "large blue soft old (pillow)" nor recursion for possessives like in "my mother's uncle's cat's (toy)". Due to these observations made by Daniel Everett, as well as his conclusion that embedded clauses in this language can only have one level of depth i.e. "he knows about making food" would be acceptable but "he knows how to talk about making food" would require two sentences, he asserted that there are a finite number of sentences in Pirahã.