EVOLVING THE NARROW LANGUAGE FACULTY: WAS RECURSION THE PIVOTAL STEP?

Anna R. Parker

61 citations0/0 files storedThe Evolution of Language

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language and cultural evolution Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Language Development and Disorders

Abstract

property of human language is recursion. In this paper, following a critical analysis of what is meant by the term, I examine three reasons why the recursion-only hypothesis a cannot be correct: (i) recursion is neither unique to language in humans, nor unique to our species, (ii) human language consists of many properties which are unique to it, and independent of recursion, and (iii) recursion may not even be necessary to human communication. Consequently, if recursion is not the key defining property of human language, it should not be granted special status in an evolutionary account of the system. 1.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

References

2002The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?2002Foundations of Language 1990Natural language and natural selection 1980Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.2002Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution 2005The faculty of language: what's special about it?2005Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã 1988Language and problems of knowledge : the Managua lectures

Cited by

2016Language as an instrument of thought 20103. Syntactic recursion and iteration 2010The redundancy of recursion and infinity for natural language 2010Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?2006Evolution as a constraint on theories of syntax : the Case against Minimalism 2014What linguists are talking about when talking about…2020

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.