Recursion across Domains

Description

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.

Luiz Amaral is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on second language acquisition, bilingual development, language revitalization and native languages of Brazil and Mexico. He was the coordinator of the projects on Pedagogical Grammars for Indigenous Languages in Brazil (Museu do Indio/UNESCO) and Pedagogical Grammars for Otomanguean Languages in Mexico (INALI/Juan de Cordoba Library). He is currently the co-director of the Language Acquisition Research Center at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Marcus Maia is Professor of Linguistics at the Departmente of Linguistics, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He has published extensively on relative clauses, interrogative, evidentiality, focus and topic constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and Karaja. Andrew Nevins is Professor of Linguistics at University College London and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has written and published multiple books and articles including Morphotactics (2012), Locality in Vowel Harmony (2010) and Inflectional Identity (2008), and actively works on new methods of studying underdocumented languages. Tom Roeper is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He works primarily in theoretical approaches to language acquisition and morphology. He is co-author of Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (2003), co-editor of the journal Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, and one of the founding editors of Language Acquisition.

'In the light of recent claims according to which syntactic recursion is the defining property of natural language, this volume offers an excellent collection of contributions dealing with the issue of how to detect and define recursion across syntactic domains and different languages. Since many chapters provide a comparison between languages that have been in the focus of recent debates on recursion and indigenous languages of Brazil, the book is a 'must read' for linguists interested in the issue of recursion from a typological perspective.' Andreas Trotzke, Universitat Konstanz, Germany