Abstract
There has been a recent spate of work on recursion as a central design feature of language and specifically of syntax. This short report points out that there is little evidence that unlimited recursion, understood as centre embedding, is typical of natural language syntax. Nevertheless, embedded pragmatic construals seem available in every language. Further, much deeper centre embedding can be found in dialogue or conversation structure than can be found in syntax. Existing accounts for the ‘performance’ limitations on centre embedding are thus thrown in doubt. Dialogue materials suggest that centre embedding is perhaps a core part of the human interaction system and is for some reason much more highly restricted in syntax than in other aspects of cognition.
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- 1.
See, for example, the discussion of Amele in Comrie & Kuteva (2008).
- 2.
The observations are not new, but take on a new significance in the light of recent discussion. They were made early in conversation analysis (e.g. Sacks, 1995 [1967]; see Schegloff (2007) for review), and I even pointed out their significance in terms of the Chomsky hierarchy 30 years ago (Levinson, 1981), noting however a number of non-syntax-like properties. See also Koschmann (2010). Merritt (1976) also discussed a range of discourse structures in services encounters, including embeddings.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the participants at The International Conference on Language and Recursion, Mons, Belgium, 14 March 2011; my colleagues at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (especially Penelope Brown, Kobin Kendrick, Pim Levelt and Karl-Magnus Peterssen); and Nick Evans for comments on this work. A fuller version of many of these ideas can be found in Levinson (2013). This work was conducted within the framework of the ERC Advanced Grant #269484 INTERACT.
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Levinson, S.C. (2014). Pragmatics as the Origin of Recursion. In: Lowenthal, F., Lefebvre, L. (eds) Language and Recursion. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9414-0_1
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