Chomsky sotto attacco: il caso della ricorsione / Chomsky under attack. The case of recursion
Abstract
According to some critics of the generativist program, recursion is not a linguistic universal, thus it cannot be regarded as the distinctive property of natural language. The criticism is based on a counterexample: Pirahã language, which seems to be devoid of any nestled structure. Moreover, there are other languages, such as Bininj Gun-wok, Kathlamet and Kayardild, in which nestled structures are very rare or limited to only one level of nestling.
In this paper I propose to address this issue not from the point of view of the (stricto sensu) universality of recursion, but, instead, from the point of view of its explanatory role. In other words, the real question is to what extent we need recursion to explain how language works. More specifically, I will argue that: i) recursion is the best explanation of the discrete infinity –which is a constitutive property of language; and ii) syntax must have a recursive structure, because it must express conceptual structures that are in turn recursive.
Riferimenti bibliografici
CARRUTHERS, Peter (2011), The opacity of mind: an integrative theory of self-knowledge, Oxford University Press.
CARRUTHERS, Peter (2015), The centered mind: what the science of working memory shows us about the nature of human thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
CHOMSKY, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordercht.
CHOMSKY, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, The MIT Press, Cambridge.
CHOMSKY, Noam (2013), «Problems of Projection», in Lingua, 130, pp. 33-49.
CHOMSKY, Noam (2014), Minimal Recursion: Exploring the Prospects, in ROEPER T., SPEAS M. (eds.), Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, Springer, New York/Dordrecht/London, pp. 1-16.
EVANS, Nicholas, LEVINSON, Stephen C. (2009), «The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science», in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 5, pp. 429-448.
EVERETT, Daniel (2005), «Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Piraha: Another look at the design features of human language», in Current Anthropology, 76(4), pp. 621-646.
HAUSER, Marc, CHOMSKY, Noam, FITCH, Tecumseh (2002), «The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?», in Science, 298, pp. 1569-1579.
JACKENDOFF, Ray (1987), Consciousness and computational mind, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA).
LASNIK, Howard (2000), Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA).
MORO, Andrea (2006), I confini di Babele, Longanesi, Milano.
PINKER, Steven, JACKENDOFF, Ray (2005), «What’s special about the human language faculty?», in Cognition, 95(2), pp. 201-236.
PULLUM, Geoffrey K., SCHOLZ, Barbara C. (2010), Recursion and the infinitude claim, in H. VAN DER HULST (ed.), Recursion and Human Language, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 115-137.
SOARE, Robert I. (1996), «Computability and Recursion», in Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2, 3, pp. 284-321.
TOMASELLO, Michael (2009), «Universal Grammar is Dead», in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 5, pp. 470-471.
VAN DER HULST, Harry (2010), Re Recursion, in Id. (ed.), Recursion and Human Language, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. xv-liii.
VICARI, Giuseppe (2014), Beyond Language: Recursive Mechanisms in the Structure of Intentional Actions. Tesi di dottorato in Neuroscienze, Università di Torino.
Quest'opera è distribuita con Licenza Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
