This volume focuses on recursion and reveals a host of new theoretical arguments, philosophical perspectives, formal representations, and empirical evidence from parsing, acquisition, and computer models, highlighting its central role in modern science. Noam Chomsky, whose work introduced recursion to linguistics and cognitive science, and other leading researchers in the fields of philosophy, semantics, computer science, and psycholinguistics in showing the profound reach of this concept into modern science.

Recursion has been at the heart of generative grammar from the outset. Recent work in minimalism has put it at center-stage with a wide range of consequences across the intellectual landscape. The contributors to this volume both advance the field and provide a cross-sectional view of the place that recursion takes in modern science.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Minimal Recursion: Exploring the Prospects.- Recursion Restrictions: Where Grammars Count.- Deriving the Two-argument Restriction without Recursion.- Embedding Illocutionary Acts.- Recursion, Legibility, Use.- Recursion and Truth.- Recursion in Language: Is it Indirectly constrained?.- Recursion in Grammar and Performance.- Empirical Results and Formal Approaches to Recursion in Acquisition.- Recursive Complements and Propositional Attitudes.- Recursive Merge and Human Language Evolution.