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This book provides a comprehensive account of the role of recursion in language in two distinct but interconnected ways. First, David J. Lobina examines how recursion applies at different levels within a full description of natural language. Specifically, he identifies and evaluates recursion as: a) a central property of the computational system underlying the faculty of language; b) a possible feature of the derivations yielded by this computational system; c) a global characteristic of the structures generated by the language faculty; and d) a probable factor in the parsing operations employed during the processing of recursive structures. Second, the volume orders these different levels into a tripartite explanatory framework. According to this framework, the investigation of any particular cognitive domain must begin by first outlining what sort of mechanical procedure underlies the relevant capacity (including what sort of structures it generates). Only then, the author argues, can we properly investigate its implementation, both at the level of abstract computations typical of competence-level analyses, and at the level of the real-time processing of behaviour.
List of contents
- Preface
- Putting up barriers
- 1: Preliminaries
- 2: Recursive generation in language
- 3: The derivations into the interfaces
- 4: The universality and uniqueness of recursion-in-language
- 5: On recursive parsing
- 6: Probing recursion
- Putting it all together
- Postface
- References
- Index
About the author
David J. Lobina is a Juan de la Cierva fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD in cognitive science and language from the University of Barcelona and the University of Rovira i Virgili, and is a former Marie Curie fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He specializes in the philosophies of cognitive science and psychology, in psycholinguistics, and in theoretical linguistics.
Summary
The book examines one of the most contested topics in linguistics and cognitive science: the role of recursion in language. It offers a precise account of what recursion is, what role it should play in cognitive theories of human knowledge, and how it manifests itself in the mental representations of language and other cognitive domains.
Additional text
it provides a novel way to probe the link between linguistic competence and performance, and the relation between recursion and Merge ... the book keeps the central principles of current biolinguistics by sticking to a bottom-up approach to syntactic building, and focusing on dynamic syntactic derivations. This may bring about dramatic and interesting changes in the thoughts of constructing syntactic theory ... the book offers very thought-provoking insights into the research of recursion.
Report
it provides a novel way to probe the link between linguistic competence and performance, and the relation between recursion and Merge ... the book keeps the central principles of current biolinguistics by sticking to a bottom-up approach to syntactic building, and focusing on dynamic syntactic derivations. This may bring about dramatic and interesting changes in the thoughts of constructing syntactic theory ... the book offers very thought-provoking insights into the research of recursion. Juan Luo, Journal of Linguistics
