المحاضرة#11

Lesson #11
. The Heartbeat of Grammar: Recursion
In just a few weeks after they first begin combining words, children seem
suddenly to explode with long sentences. Two words blossom into 3, 4, 5 words, just
full of intriguing quirks of child grammar. Here are a few English examples from a
25 month old where two structures are connected in not quite adult fashion:
I can no eat it
I can no get it
I want cut it the bread
I trying hammer it (NN1)
Not just words are merged, but structures, too, are laid on structures to build
hierarchies (I trying + hammer it). Whole systems get locked into each other, like a
motor onto a chassis and the chassis onto wheels. The same simple form of creativity
we saw in compounds is at the core, pounding like a heart. First we used merge to
bring words together and then recursion to create new structure. Now the child is
ready to break into more complex expressions.
Recursion is the Core of Linguistic Creativity
All of grammatical theory circles around the idea of recursion. It is central to
Chomsky s original insights in developing "generative" grammar—a system that
generates more of itself from within itself. Now Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch have
argued that it is recursion that separates human language from animal communicative
systems.
"FLN [narrow faculty of language] only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language,… [it] appears to lack any analog in animal communication… allowing us to communicate an endless variety of thoughts.." (NN2)
And I think the essence of the acquisition challenge may lie right there, too---how to see precisely where recursion occurs. So let s take a close look at what children manage to decipher. (nn3) Once we have seen the power of this amazing syntactic engine, we return in the next chapters to the question of how meanings are projected onto it.
Put Something inside Itself!
First let us take a broad overview of the places where we find recursion before we unpack the mechanisms behind a few of them. In English, words, phrases, clauses, and even discourse phrases all reproduce themselves,:
word level:
prefixation: re-re-read, anti-anti-missile missile
adjective: big, black, strange, bear
compound: student film group festival
phrase level:
possessive: John s friend s car s motor
preposition: in the kitchen in the cabinet in the corner
conjunction: and I went and I saw and I conquered
John and Bill and Susan
clause:
infinitive: John wants to start to go to sing
finite: Mary thinks I think you think she did it
Recursion can either sprinkle one meaning across many words, or recast meaning dramatically with each new word. Speaking intuitively there are several kinds of “reproducing” systems which we will discuss: recursion reproduces something inside itself (like a sentence inside a sentence) repetition (iteration) reproduces the whole entity (as in “very, very, very”) and “Concord,” a kind of agreement, marks something that has been reproduced by recursion. Here a recursive prepositional phrase under a negative (“didn’t”) has all of its somes turned into
anys:
I didn’t see a man [PP in some place [PP at some time [PP for some reason]]]=>
in any place at any time for any reason.
Very generally, how do repetition, concord and self-embedding recursion relate? We have to look closer to see the differences.
Repetition
Repetition is not usually considered to be recursion. Recursion is when an abstract category like Noun or Adjective spawns itself, but repetition is when a lexical item repeats itself
very, very, very big
I once asked a four-year-old how many times you can put "very" in front of "big.” He proceeded to produce at least 25. But even this simple intensification system shows limits. We can repeat words, but not phrases, or units of two words:
These are fine:
very, very, very big
big, big, big house
so so so big house
big strange house
But these are not.
*so very, so very, so very happy
*so big, so big, so big house
*big strange, big strange, big strange old house
The cat meowed The cat [the dog chased] meowed The cat [the dog [the man hit] chased] meowed.
Or with thats to make it clearer The cat meowed The cat [that the dog chased] meowed The cat [that the dog [that the man hit] chased] meowed.
Alex has a red car.
An application of recursion would give:
Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car.
And then:
Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car which is parked there.
And so on. This can go on endlessly, even if in real situations recursion will stop at a certain point, since the idea being expressed would get too confused. Recursion can also be applied to a noun and its adjectives:
Nice Alice.
And
Nice and cute Alice.
And again
Nice and cute Alice, sweet, gentle and considerate.