Recursive misrepresentations

A reply to Levinson (2013)

Dados Bibliográficos

ID11630774
AutoresJulie Anne Legate (California University of Pennsylvania), David Pesetsky (0000-0003-1530-9230, California University of Pennsylvania), Charles Yang (0000-0003-4160-265X, California University of Pennsylvania)
Ano2014
Volume90
Fascículo2
Páginas515-528
Data de publicação2014-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguage (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
EditoraLinguistic Society of America (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2014.0034
OpenAlexW2069233730
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas8
Referências citadas21

Levinson 2013 (L13) argues against the idea that ‘recursion, and especially recursive center-embedding, might be the core domain-specific property of language’ (p. 159), citing crosslinguistic grammatical data and specific corpus studies. L13 offers an alternative: language inherits its recursive properties ‘from the action domain’ (p. 159). We argue that L13’s claims are at best un-warranted and can in many instances be shown to be false. L13’s reasoning is similarly flawed— in particular, the presumption that center-embedding can stand proxy for embedding (and clausal embedding can stand proxy for recursion). Thus, no support remains for its conclusions. Furthermore, though these conclusions are pitched as relevant to specific claims that have been published about the role of syntactic recursion, L13 misrepresents these claims. Consequently, even an empirically supported, better-reasoned version of L13 would not bear on the questions it claims to address

Algorithm · Assertion · Embedding · Epistemology · Linguistics · Machine learning · Political science · Presumption · Programming language · Property (philosophy · Proxy (statistics · Recursion (computer science · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Law · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation