Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of...
by ookdatnog on Thursday April 22, 2021 @11:37AM
(#26903955)
> In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses.
I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.
I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.