"High scientific standards", control, and Everett and Gibson’s review of Recursion Across Domains
Cilene Rodrigues
December 2019 

In their review of the book Recursion Across Domains (Amaral, Maia, Nevins, and Roeper 2018), Everett and Gibson (2019) focus on four chapters devoted to Pirahã, concluding: “unfortunately, the chapters investigating Pirahã do not meet high scientific standards.” In this reply, I focus on their criticism of chapter 6 "Word order in control: evidence for self-embedding in Pirahã", observing that (a) the alternative analysis they hint at does not account for the empirical facts as they are, and (b) their counterarguments are based on a misunderstanding of what control is. In addition, I go through their comments concerning our competence as linguists, the competence of our sources, and their criticism of our data, showing that they are unjustified.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004928 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted for publication at Language
keywords:	pirahã, obligatory control configurations, self-embedding, semantics, morphology, syntax
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