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SaltEnjoyer (talk | contribs) →In language: clarification needed for "This is really just a special case of the mathematical definition of recursion." Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
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Linguist [[Noam Chomsky]], among many others, has argued that the lack of an upper bound on the number of grammatical sentences in a language, and the lack of an upper bound on grammatical sentence length (beyond practical constraints such as the time available to utter one), can be explained as the consequence of recursion in natural language.<ref>{{cite book|last=Pinker|first=Steven|title=The Language Instinct|year=1994|publisher=William Morrow}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal | doi = 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.004 | title = The faculty of language: What's so special about it? | year = 2005 | last1 = Pinker | first1=Steven | last2 = Jackendoff | first2=Ray | journal = Cognition | volume = 95 | issue = 2 | pages = 201–236 | pmid=15694646| citeseerx = 10.1.1.116.7784 | s2cid = 1599505 }}</ref>
This can be understood in terms of a recursive definition of a syntactic category, such as a sentence. A sentence can have a structure in which what follows the verb is another sentence: ''Dorothy thinks witches are dangerous'', in which the sentence ''witches are dangerous'' occurs in the larger one. So a sentence can be defined recursively (very roughly) as something with a structure that includes a noun phrase, a verb, and optionally another sentence. This is really just a special case of the mathematical definition of recursion.{{Clarification needed|date=August 2025}}
This provides a way of understanding the creativity of language—the unbounded number of grammatical sentences—because it immediately predicts that sentences can be of arbitrary length: ''Dorothy thinks that Toto suspects that Tin Man said that...''. There are many structures apart from sentences that can be defined recursively, and therefore many ways in which a sentence can embed instances of one category inside another.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.thoughtco.com/recursion-grammar-1691901|title=What Is Recursion in English Grammar?|last=Nordquist|first=Richard|website=ThoughtCo|language=en|access-date=2019-10-24}}</ref> Over the years, languages in general have proved amenable to this kind of analysis.
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