Been a lot of fuss about recursion lately.

First, we heard from Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (would you trust them if they were a law firm?) that RECURSION was not only the central process in syntax, it was also the ONLY part of language unique to humans.

Then we heard from Dan Everett, via the New Yorker no less, that there was a language, Piraha, that didn't have any recursion!  Generativists went apeshit.  Dan had to have got it wrong!  Recursion was a language universal!  OF COURSE Piraha had recursion.  But Dan hung tough.  Maybe there weren't universals,  maybe there wasn't even a biological program for language, after all.

And everybody, I think without exception, missed the point (anything unusual about that, these days?)

Just think for a moment.  Of course language is a biological program.   But what do such programs do, do they mandate stuff?  Well, structure, maybe.  I mean, we're all programmed to have two legs, aren't we?  But once in a while some poor kid is born without any.  Does that prove there's no biological program for building humans?  And that's structural.  What about behavior?  No way any biological program can mandate behavior.  What it does is make behaviors possible.  Universal grammar says we can include click sounds but hardly any grammmars do.  Universal grammar says we can have definite articles and some languages do and some don't.  Universal grammar says we can have recursive syntax and most, maybe all languages do, but if one doesn't, what does that show?

Nada.  Zero.  Zilch.

But wait, as they say in TV ads, there's more.

This whole thing got me thinking about recursion.  Why is it such a big deal?  Is it really such a big deal?  Is it really...REAL:?

Well, folks, it ain't.  Syntax does NOT require recursion. You can construct the most complex sentence you can think of without any recursive process whatsoever.  Recursion is an artifact of analysis.

And whose reasoning did I follow to reach this conclusion?  believe it or not--Chomsky's own!

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