[PLUG-TALK] Go linguistics!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 20:09:06 -0700
Denis Heidtmann <denis.heidtmann at gmail.com> dijo:

>On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 5:34 PM, John Jason Jordan
><johnxj at comcast.net>wrote:
>
>>  For example, the Pirahã language was recently discovered and, to the
>> amazement of the researcher who documented it, it is not recursive.

>For us 'tards, pleas give us a tutorial on what recursive means when
>applied to a human language.

Just like directories, you have the root, then a directory, within the
directory another directory, within that directory another directory,
and so on until you computer melts or the file system vomits all its
files into your lap.

In the case of a human language you can embed endless clauses within
other clauses. For silly examples:

	This is the mouse | that the cat dragged in | that ran up the
	clock | that struck the hour ...

	I went to the store | on the way to the university | where I
	study linguistics | with the help | of many professors ...

In theory, for human languages, there is no limit to the level of
recursion. In practice, after a while your interlocutor loses track of
where you started from, typically at the point where people run out of
slots for working memory (six to nine in the general population).
Speech allows greater recursion than writing because of the prosodic and
syntactic markers that speech uses, which are not as available in
writing.

Another way to think of recursion is to look at a phrase structure tree
for a complex sentence. Clauses are nested under other clauses so, if
the sentence is long, or even just as short as this one, the tree will
require a very large sheet of paper.