Recursive misrepresentations: A reply to Levinson (2013)

Levinson 2013 (L13) argues against the idea that ‘recursion, and especially recursive center-embedding, might be the core domain-specific property of language’ (p. 159), citing crosslinguistic grammatical data and specific corpus studies. L13 offers an alternative: language inherits its recursive properties ‘from the action domain’ (p. 159). We argue that L13’s claims are at best un-warranted and can in many instances be shown to be false. L13’s reasoning is similarly flawed— in particular, the presumption that center-embedding can stand proxy for embedding (and clausal embedding can stand proxy for recursion). Thus, no support remains for its conclusions. Furthermore, though these conclusions are pitched as relevant to specific claims that have been published about the role of syntactic recursion, L13 misrepresents these claims. Consequently, even an empirically supported, better-reasoned version of L13 would not bear on the questions it claims to address.