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.
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 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.
References
Asher, N., Sher, I., & Williams, M. (2001). Game theoretical foundations for Gricean constraints. In R. van Rooy & M. Stokhof (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 31–37). ILLC Publications.
Blackburn, S. (1984). Spreading the word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blackburn, S. (1988). Attitudes and contents. Ethics, 98, 501–517.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. (2001). Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (Ed.), Ken hale: A life in language (pp. 1–52). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2003). Reply to Horwich. In N. Hornstein & L. Anthony (Eds.), Chomsky and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
de Villiers, J. (2007). The interface of language and theory of mind. Lingua, 117, 1858–1878.
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (2003). Language for thought: Coming to understand false beliefs. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
de Villiers, J. G., & Pyers, J. E. (2002). Complements to cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cognitive Development, 17, 1037–1060.
Epstein, S., & Sealy, D. (2006). Derivations in minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geach, P. (1958). Imperative and deontic logic. Analysis, 18, 49–56.
Geach, P. (1960). Ascriptivism. The Philosophical Review, 69, 221–225.
Geach, P. (1965). Assertion. The Philosophical Review, 74, 449–465.
Gibbard, A. (2003). Thinking how to live. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Grim, P. (2007, November). The emergence of Gricean constraints: Lessons from simulation. Talk given at Games and Decisions in Pragmatics III, the Center for General Linguistics, Berlin.
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1579.
Heim, I., & Kratzer, A. (1998). Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwells.
Horwich, P. (1998). Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horwich, P. (2003). Meaning and its place in the language faculty. In N. Hornstein & L. Anthony (Eds.), Chomsky and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Horwich, P. (2005). Reflections on meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaplan, D. (2001). The meaning of Ouch and Oops (Explorations in the theory of Meaning as Use), Draft #3, ms., UCLA.
Parikh, P. (2001). The use of language. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Roeper, T. (2005). The prism of language: How child language illuminates humanism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Roeper, T., & Snyder, W. (2005). Language learnability and the forms of recursion. In A.-M. Di Sciullo (Ed.), UG and external systems: Language, brain, and computation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ross, D. (1939). Foundations of ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schroeder, M. (2008). Being for. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. (1962). Meaning and speech acts. The Philosophical Review, 71, 423–432.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts, an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Stevenson, C. (1944). Ethics and language. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Unwin, N. (1999). Quasi-realism, negation and the frege-geach problem. The Philosophical Quarterly, 49(196), 337–352.
Unwin, N. (2001). Norms and negation: A problem for Gibbard’s logic. The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202), 60–75.
van Rooy, R. (2004). Signalling games select horn strategies. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27, 493–527.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05086-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05085-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05086-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)