“A Running Back” and Forth: A Review of Recursion and Human Language

Abstract

An attentive reader of the cognitive science literature would have noticed that the term recursion has appeared in myriad publications, and in many guises, in the last 50 or so years. However, it seems to have gained a disproportionate amount of attention ever since Hauser et al. (2002) hypothesized (for that is what it was) that this property may be the central and unique feature of the faculty of language. Indeed, a barrage of publications, conferences, and even critical notes in the popular press about recursion has recently flooded academia. The volume under review here is the result of one such conference — one that was celebrated in 2007 at the Illinois State University — and it offers, or so it says, a compendium of works that tackle this notion from different perspectives. I will not be following the thematic division underlying this volume as a way to frame the “different perspectives” it advertizes. Rather, this critical note will focus on four distinct senses of the term recursion that can appropriately be applied, or so it will be argued here, to four well-defined theoretical constructs of the cognitive sciences. The formal sciences will, naturally, inform most of this discussion, but the focus of this note will fall on relating the different perspectives of this collection to the four senses of recursion I will outline. Ultimately, this review will press one main point: Contrary to a(n apparently) widespread belief, neatly stated in this book’s back cover, it is simply not true that recursive structures in languages “suggest recursive mechanisms in the grammar” (at least not in the sense that is usually intended in the literature — see infra).1 The one feature that binds together the four theoretical constructs I will be focusing on is the self-reference property that characterizes recursion — a feature that is quite unrelated to the uses to which this notion can be applied. This self-