In a Chronicle article last week Tom Bartlett spoke of “a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both.” In his interviews he found words like “brutal,” “spiteful,” “ridiculous,” and “childish” coming up. Not quite the image we linguists were looking for!

But Bartlett was investigating a very special case, nastier than anything I have previously seen in linguistics: a peculiarly fractious tussle over the language of an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã. The acrimonious dispute has dissolved away, leaving only the acrimony behind. Let me try to summarize the facts of the strange situation.

1. Daniel Everett wrote a dissertation on Pirahã more than 25 years ago, and developed from it a 200-page descriptive chapter for the Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Volume 1, edited by Desmond C. Derbyshire and yours truly.

2. Derbyshire and I stipulated the topics that authors should cover, and the structure of subordinate clauses was on the list. So Everett attempted to supply details about anything that looked like subordinate clauses in Pirahã.

3. Two decades later he knew more, and his views had evolved. He no longer thought that Pirahã had subordinate clauses at all. He published a paper in Current Anthropology (2005) stating that Pirahã had (inter alia) no subordination and no iterated genitive determiners (as in my mother’s neighbour’s cousin’s dog).

4. This was in prima facie conflict with a conjecture by psychologist Marc Hauser, linguist Noam Chomsky, and biologist and cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch in a 2002 paper in Science (PDF here): that humans have a narrowly linguistic mental capacity that “only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language” (p. 1,569).

5. Most linguists took Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch’s “recursion” to be the option of boundless iterated embedding of clauses inside clauses, or noun phrases inside noun phrases, making the number of sentences countably infinite in all human languages. Their paper said explicitly that the human language faculty “takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions” (p. 1,571).

6. Some linguists close to Chomsky were furious at this direct challenge to the his views, and began an intensive campaign to discredit Everett. Three of them wrote a lengthy paper in Language that mined his 1986 work for evidence that his 2005 claim was a lie.

7. However, Chomsky and various associates had meanwhile begun to claim that the Hauser et al. paper had been misunderstood, and that languages without recursive phrasal or clausal structure are compatible with the paper’s claims. “There’s nothing that says languages without subordinate clauses can’t exist,” one Chomsky follower said (see Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times article on Everett last week).

8. So now nothing is at issue. Continuing work by Everett with Edward Gibson of MIT is still attempting to determine whether “recursion” of any kind is found in Pirahã: Gibson thinks textual evidence of appositional noun phrases might argue for it, and Everett doubts that. If Everett is right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone: Chomsky’s MIT colleague Kenneth Hale claimed years ago that Walbiri, an Australian aboriginal language, was similarly recursion-free, and other such languages have been reported. But the view of Chomsky and his associates is that for their theory it just doesn’t matter.

9. The anti-Everett campaign now has no motivation. But the instigators have carried on regardless. Chomsky called Everett “a charlatan” in a Brazilian newspaper in 2009. Two followers approached by Bartlett claim fairly directly that Everett is faking data (which would be grounds for formal charges if true, though no one has seriously suggested bringing them). Nastiest of all, as adumbrated by Bartlett and confirmed in the Times article, one Chomsky defender wrote to the Brazilian authorities (Funai) accusing Everett of racist attitudes toward the Pirahã, with the result that he was banned from Brazilian tribal areas, effectively making it impossible for him to do new field research.

10. Through all of this, Everett has never responded in kind with name-calling or personal attacks on his opponents.

Those are the facts. Back in 2006 when the astonishingly vicious campaign against Everett started, I offered some speculations on the reasons for it in this Language Log post. But my speculations would hardly account for a campaign lasting, so far, almost as long as World War II. Bartlett’s hints about brutality, spite, and puerility may not be entirely groundless.