There was very sad news yesterday: Tanya Reinhart died suddenly on a visit to Long Island, NY. Here is the announcement from her colleagues at Tel Aviv University:
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:45:52 +0200
Subject: Sad, sad news
Dear friends,
Yesterday we lost Tanya Reinhart. She died in New York, a sudden death.
It’s hardly possible to describe Tanya’s fundamental contribution and significance for the field of linguistics.
Tanya was a wonderful colleague, a challenging and at the same time most supportive advisor and mentor, and a dedicated political and human
rights activist.
The linguistics department at Tel Aviv University and the cognitive program owe a great debt to Tanya. She was a crucial part of what we
tried to build here for so many years. Her excellence was an inspiration to many of us.
We shall always remember Tanya. She was our friend. The best you could wish for.
As soon as we have the information about her funeral, we will send out an announcement.
Sadly,
Mira, Rachel and Tali
I first met Tanya when I was a beginning graduate student, at the 1991 LSA summer institute in Santa Cruz. We talked about the work on exceptives that I was doing and that was related to work that she had been doing. She was very generous with her time and her comments. I will never forget her contribution to a conference during that institute, especially during the Q&A period after her talk, when she displayed an inimitable incisiveness and combativeness. I liked and admired her very much and thoroughly enjoyed our all too infrequent meetings in the years since — the last one, I believe, at a summer institute in Germany in 2002 where we both taught.
This is a terrible loss for our field and for all of us.
Obituaries:
The program of this year’s SALT conference is online now. The UConn organizers are urging everyone who plans to attend the conference, to preregister as soon as possible to make it easier to plan for the conference. I’ll be there Friday and part of Saturday at least. Hope to see you then.
Andrew Ira Nevins, David Pesetsky, Cilene Rodrigues: “Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment”. ms, March 2007.
Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying “inexplicable gaps”, that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to “immediate experience”, and that this principle has “severe” consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical “gaps” supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world’s languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the “immediate experience” restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirahã grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a “severe” one.
The past few days, I was in DC for the annual Georgetown University Roundtable, where I gave a plenary talk on conditionals. The slides for the talk (supplemented with two slides that clarify a point that I failed to make coherently in the talk) can be downloaded, but I don’t know how much sense they make without me talking at the same time (and even then …). The talk is an evolution, with a new twist at the end, of my talk at the conditionals conference at UConn last year.
I hope to be able to write up this material in a proper format some time soon. I’d appreciate comments or questions.
PS. I would bet a lot of money that this is the first talk that cites Bertrand Russell and Dolly Parton.
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