Mathematics, Recursion, and Universals in Human Languages. (arXiv:0909.3591v1 [cs.CL])

There are many scientific problems generated by the multiple and conflicting
alternative definitions of linguistic recursion and human recursive processing
that exist in the literature. The purpose of this article is to make available
to the linguistic community the standard mathematical definition of recursion
and to apply it to discuss linguistic recursion. As a byproduct, we obtain an
insight into certain "soft universals" of human languages, which are related to
cognitive constructs necessary to implement mathematical reasoning, i.e.
mathematical model theory.

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Original source : http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3591...