Steven N. Sheldon was the Executive Director of SIL International from 1992 to 2000. He is known to the

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

community for his field work and documentation of the

Pirahã language Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is the only survivi ...

. His 1988 paper on the Pirahã

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

system is still the basic (if not the only) reference on that subject.

Publications

* Steven N. Sheldon (1974) ''Some morphophonemic and tone perturbation rules in Mura-Pirahã''. International Journal of American Linguistics, v. 40 279–282. * Steven N. Sheldon (1988) ''Os sufixos verbais Mura-Pirahã'' (= ''Mura-Pirahã verbal suffixes''). SIL International, Série Lingüística Nº 9, Vol. 2: 147–175. In

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

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References

Living people Linguists of Pirahã Year of birth missing (living people) Linguists from the United States {{US-linguist-stub