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simazhi's review against another edition
4.0
I am going to be short about this book. I like the way it uses the metaphor of 'dark matter' for those cultural practices we unconsciously learn and guide our language and daily life. Everett is in the favourable position of having had 30 years of fieldwork, most famously with the Pirahã, whose cultural practices and worldview stand in such a stark contrast to Western society's conventions that it becomes clear once again that the 'McGuffin' of innateness / universal grammar / LAD is too simple as an explanation of various phenomena that usually form the object of linguistic study. However, Everett does use some principles from his (former) formal approaches to look at the dark matter he is interested in, so he is not throwing away everything that was achieved under this approach. Where he lacks, and which is why I took off a star, is his inability to sketch and apply other approaches in this essay — as he terms this book occasionally. There are some functional approaches, like Van Valin & LaPolla's Role & Reference Grammar, but Cognitive Linguistic approaches are lacking, even though they would seem the perfect frameworks to discuss what Everett calls dark matter, and have done so in the past. Unfortunately, Lakoff and Langacker only get a name drop, and that's it... That being said, I think this book does approach its topic with well-thought out reasoning and would recommend it to my peers.
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