On the Absence of X-within-X Recursion in Human Grammar

By Boban Arsenijević, Wolfram Hinzen. Linguistic Inquiry, 2012

54 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We make these observations: (a) The direct embedding of a syntactic category X in itself (X-within-X) is surprisingly rare in human language, if it exists at all. (b) Indirect self-embedding (mediated by a sequence of other categories, and usually a phase boundary) systematically goes along with intensionality effects; the embedding and the embedded XP exhibit different behavior at the semantic interface. We argue that these constraints on recursion follow from the way in which single-cycle derivations organize semantic information in grammar.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Studies, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e83ccb98b0a46133dff2435352e0b04fcc21af3