Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 30
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as a structural archetype; however, the heart of such a claim lies in recursion, which all examples
I have previously cited are based on. If recursion weren't a structure imbedded in the human
mind, perhaps language wouldn't rely so heavily on the usefulness of recursive structures in
grammar to bear the fruits of concise meaning. According to Pinker:
Without recursion, you can't say "the man's hat" or "I think he left." Recall that all you
need for recursion is an ability to embed a NP inside another NP or a clause within a
clause, which falls out of rules as simple as "NP=det/N/PP" and "PP=P/NP". With this
ability, a speaker can pick out an object to an arbitrarily fine level of precision. These
abilities can make a big difference. It makes a difference whether a far-off region is
reached by taking the trail that is in front of the large tree or the trail that the large tree is
in front of. It makes a difference whether that region has animals that you can eat or
animals that can eat you. It makes a difference whether it has fruit that is ripe or fruit that
was ripe or fruit that will be ripe. It makes a difference whether you can get there if you
walk for three days or whether you can get there and walk for three days.26
Topographically, the principle of recursion is evident in the labeled branches of many a
phrase structure tree, labeled branches that, as Pinker states, " ... act as an overarching memory
or plan for the whole sentence. This allows nested long-distance dependencies, like "if ... then"
and "either ... or", to be handled with ease. All you need is a rule defining a phrase that contains
a copy of the very same kind of phrase, such as:
S= either S or S
"A sentence can consist of the word "either", followed by a sentence, followed by the
word "or", followed by another sentence."30
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/33/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .