Abstract
Certain kinds of cognitive abilities are required for recursive structures to be legible. Once the basic abilities are in place and recursive structures become legible, our ability to construct and express complex ideas is unbounded. It is argued that the prerequisite cognitive abilities are rules of semantic composition, understood expressivistically – that is, they are higher-level operations on expressivist attitudes. These operations on attitudes place constraints on the grammar, since different operations make legible different kinds of recursive structures.
Keywords
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the University of Massachusetts conference on Recursion, held in May 2009. Thanks are due to Sean Ebels Dugan for comments on that draft. Special thanks are due to Angelika Kratzer for her commentary at the conference, to Noam Chomsky for a key suggestion involving the integration of the use theory, and to Jason Stanley an anonymous reviewer for comments on the antepenultimate draft of this paper. Discussion in a Rutgers reading group on Mark Schroeder’s Being For, helped me to formulate the final version of the expressivist proposal, which I subsequently ran past Andy Egan’s graduate seminar on the foundations of semantics. I am particularly endebted to Andy, Simon Goldstein, and Una Stonjnic for questions and comments. None of the above are yet convinced that any of this works.
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- 1.
If correct, this suggests an oversimplification in recent discussions over whether propositional attitudes come first or whether recursion comes first in human development (see deVilliers 2007; deVilliers and de Villiers 2003; de Viliers and Pyers 2002). Related to this is the issue of whether recursive linguistic forms are a precondition for thought or whether this goes in the opposite direction and thought comes first. As I argued above, the unsimplified approach to the question is that certain kinds of cognitive abilities are a pre-condition for recursion, but that in turn complex recursive structures are a precondition for our ability to express complex attitudes, and perhaps also for our even having complex attitudes.
- 2.
The semantic rules I gave would need to be supplemented to handle complex DPs but the composition rules need no additions.
- 3.
The notion of referential intention can present problems if we aren’t careful. I’m going to assume that referential intentions are individuated by real world objects, so that there is a one-one correspondence. Others may prefer to think of referential intentions as picking our “files” in the sense of file change semantics. I’m going with the external object route here simply to table issues that might arise about quantification over these elements.
- 4.
Less clear is the question of whether this has consequences for cross-linguistic variation. Examples in Roeper (2005) for example illustrate that the kinds of recursive structures allowed vary significantly across languages. French, for example, does not allow recursion on possessives, so that constructions like ‘John’s mother’s dentist’s cousin’ are not happy. Is it to feasible to think that these variations are the result of variation in the kinds of cognitive operations employed? This is certainly doubtful, given that the semantic rules deployed in the interpretation of possessive recursion are active elsewhere in the semantics. This linguistic variation appears to have its source in parametric variation in the FLN that is not tied to the C/I interface. Options are limited here; presumably one looks in constraints driven by differences between the English and French perceptual/articulatory system.
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Ludlow, P. (2014). Recursion, Legibility, Use. In: Roeper, T., Speas, M. (eds) Recursion: Complexity in Cognition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05086-7_5
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