The book examines one of the most contested topics in linguistics and cognitive science: the role of recursion in language. It offers a precise account of what recursion is, what role it should play in cognitive theories of human knowledge, and how it manifests itself in the mental representations of language and other cognitive domains.

David J. Lobina is a Juan de la Cierva fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD in cognitive science and language from the University of Barcelona and the University of Rovira i Virgili, and is a former Marie Curie fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He specializes in the philosophies of cognitive science and psychology, in psycholinguistics, and in theoretical linguistics.

• Preface


• Putting up barriers


• 1: Preliminaries


• 2: Recursive generation in language


• 3: The derivations into the interfaces


• 4: The universality and uniqueness of recursion-in-language


• 5: On recursive parsing


• 6: Probing recursion


• Putting it all together


• Postface


• References


• Index