Tom Roeper – författare

Recursion and self-embedding are at the heart of our ability to formulate our thoughts, articulate our imagination and share with other human beings. Nonetheless, controversy exists over the extent to which recursion is shared across all domains of syntax. A collection of 18 studies are presented here on the central linguistic property of recursion, examining a range of constructions in over a dozen languages representing great areal, typological and genetic diversity and spanning wide latitudes. The volume expands the topic to include prepositional phrases, possessives, adjectives, and relative clauses - our many vehicles to express creative thought - to provide a critical perspective on claims about how recursion connects to broader aspects of the mind. Parallel explorations across language families, literate and non-literate societies, children and adults are investigated and constitutes a new step in the generative tradition by simultaneously focusing on formal theory, acquisition and experimentation, and ecologically-sensitive fieldwork, and initiates a new community where these diverse experts collaborate.

This book explores how recursion—our ability to embed structures within structures—shapes human language. Bridging theory and experiment, it highlights two forms of recursion: direct recursion, which merges items directly, and indirect recursion, which embeds items within each other, showing that indirect recursion is sometimes treated as direct recursion in initial stages in acquisition. Drawing on cross-linguistic data from English, Mandarin, Hungarian, Romanian, Tamil, and other languages, the book reveals both universal patterns and language-specific variation in recursive structures such as recursive possessives, prepositional phrases, adjectives, and relative clauses. Ideal for students and researchers in linguistics, the book integrates fresh insights from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and biolinguistics to provide a comprehensive view of how recursion is structured, acquired, and processed across languages.

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 contributor to this volume both advance the field and provide a cross-sectional view of the place that recursion takes in modern science.

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 contributor to this volume both advance the field and provide a cross-sectional view of the place that recursion takes in modern science.

Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of syntactic topics that have formed the central domains of investigation and debate. These topics are treated from the unique perspective of central actors in each domain who have helped shape the research agenda. The authors have presented a summary of the data, the theories under discussion, and their own best assessments of where each domain stands. Providing as well the agenda for future work in the field showing both particular needs and general directions that should be pursued in the coming decades.