posted by Gary Stix on May 8, 2014
In this article, Michael Corballis, a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, is interviewed about his book, The Recursive Mind, which is about how the human language allows for recursion. Recursion is the language process to refer words to what appears previously. For instance, we can say and understand [He [[standing over there]] is [[[a boy] who was talking with me yesterday]]]; in this sentence, the object of “he” is connected with other items, naturally mirroring what “he” is without mentioning what he is. As an additional example, recursion functions in programming, as “Ctrl+Z” means “redo”. Noam Chomsky, who is a father of modern linguistics, believes that this process can be seen only in human beings, not in other animals; moreover, he recognizes this as “great leap forward” contrary to the theory of natural selection by Charles Darwin.
Corballis says that recursion is important in that one can create entities of theoretically unlimited complexity by it. To put it simply, we can make a sentence complex as much as we want, with this grammatical beneficial process. Recursion is a fundamental element of the modern linguistics. However, Corballis has queried Chomsky on this point. In Chomsky’s view, language is an essence of our internal thought, a mental monologue, and not a means of communication, and the structure is consequently a byproduct of the use. Yet Corballis wants the evidence to support the existence of the structure, which has been unclear. He also talks about the credibility between the reality and Chomsky’s view that the recursion such as seen in internal self-talk is not by natural selection and evolution unlike incremental steps as seen in Darwinian evolution. Corballis contrarily believes the recursive principle has been developing gradually though the constant evidences to support gradual language development have not seen in the archeological record; so that, it can be seen that recursion is “a great leap forward” only seen in humans. Nevertheless, apes and dogs can learn to respond to spoken words, which suggests they have innate and mental ideas. Even we humans, develop the abstract nature of language from silent representations that have been “conventionalized” for many years by culture rather than biological components. Language depended on an adaptation toward rising social complexity and manual gesture, with the iconic structure which has been replaced by vocal gesture. Then, may recursive behaviors precede language and have they led to the appearing of language? Chomsky says that since recursion applies to I-language, which is the language to think rather than to communicate, language to communicate emerged after the “great leap forward”. However, he does not mention about it in right order. In Corballis’s opinion, recursive thoughts preceded language in broader way. As seen in creating map mentally with language, while I-language is used with internal symbols, creating map or navigating may be related to the external world more directly than the internal symbols.
Corballis has been writing about his idea further from the Chomskyan notion; to sum up, he suggest that recursion thinking precedes communicative language like Chomsky, but linguistics and behavioral evidence of human and animals suggests that recursion happened little by little by natural select and evolution.
In my opinion, Corballis's idea is correctlly fited to the evidences which have been observed in human beings and animals. In Chomsky's ideas, recursion can be seen only human beings, and it's hardly related to the language ability of other animals; consequently it happened all of a sudden. However, through my experiences, animals also have recursion; for example, birds can detect food by my peculiar voices. Recursion is to some extent supecialized to human beings, but the root is not only from "big leap forward" but also gradual natural selections and evoltion, just as human has the same root as animals.
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