What linguists are talking about when talking about…

Abstract

A historical look at the manner in which recursion was introduced into linguistics, including how it was used thereafter, shows that Chomsky, the scholar who popularised the use of recursive techniques in linguistics, has always understood this notion to be a central feature of generative procedures, much as it was treated in mathematical logic in the 1930–50s. Recursion is the self-reference property that underlies all types of recursive functions; recursive definitions (or definitions by induction), in addition, justify every stage of the computations effected by computational procedures such as Post production systems or set-operators like merge, making recursion the central feature of a generative grammar. The contemporary literature, however, has confused this recursive property of a grammar with other constructs, such as self-embedded sentences, self-embedding operations, or certain rewriting rules, thereby obscuring the role of recursion in the theory of language. It is here shown that this is the result of the literature implicitly endorsing a number of unwarranted conflations, four of them analysed here. It is concluded that most of the discussion on the centrality and uniqueness of recursion in human language and/or general cognition has been confusing and confused for very fundamental reasons; a story of conflations, in a nutshell.