Questions tagged [recursion]
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15 questions
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What is the current status in 2025 of the Everett-Chomsky controversy / debate regarding Universal Grammar?
[Warning: I am not a linguist and have not taken a single course in linguistics. I simply love the topic]
I watched a youtube vid describing Daniel Everett's claims regarding the grammar of the ...
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Can levels of nesting in conjunctions be unambiguously systematically parsed?
This question on NLP asks for the how of parsing, and the given answer shows how the state-of-the-art isn't at that level. But whether this is a hard problem or not is not my question: what I ask is, ...
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Does Piraha syntax lack any recursion or just embedding?
I think we're all familiar with the background. Piraha is said to contradict the principles of universal grammar because it lacks embedding, but embedding and recursion aren't the same thing. Other ...
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Does the recursive capability of Merge demonstrate the productivity of human language?
I am completely new to linguistics (and have to write an essay linked to this topic) and have read about Merge, which seems to allow its outputs to be put back in as inputs. Would you say this shows ...
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Is a simple chain of independent sentences with conjunctions considered as a form of recursion?
To my understanding, recursion is a synonym of nesting, and it's distinctive when a child clause is center-embedded in the parent clause.
I believe below is an example of recursion:
The beautiful ...
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Wouldn't a language without recursion still be non-finite at the level of discourse?
[As per comments below, I have edited this question for greater clarity.]
I want to know whether a language without recursion, which would generate only a finite number of well-formed sentences, ...
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Are the morphologies of languages based on regular grammars?
Is the sets of possible morphemes of any given language a regular set, and can thus be recognized by a finite state automaton, or, equivalently, matched by regular expressions?
Or are there any ...
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Does Pirahã syntax contradict the principles of Universal Grammar?
The Wikipedia article on Universal Grammar cites the research by Everett (2005) about the Pirahã language:
Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language is claimed to be a ...
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