Recursive misrepresentations: A reply to Levinson (2013)
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Pesetsky_Recursive misrepresentations.pdf
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150.08 KB
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Author(s)
Legate, Julie Anne
Pesetsky, David
Yang, Charles
Date Issued
June 2014
Journal
Language
Publisher
Muse - Johns Hopkins University Press
Citation
Legate, Julie Anne; Pesetsky, David and Yang, Charles. “Recursive Misrepresentations: A Reply to Levinson (2013).” Language 90, 2 ( June 2014): 515–528 © 2014 Linguistic Society of America
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0034
