The Unique Property Of Human Language—the Justification For The Term Recursion

hot issue in the study of generative grammar in recent years. Chomsky has consistently claimed that human language displays the following properties:(A) recursion (B) discreteness (C) dislocation (D)φ-feature agreement. In Hauser Chomsky and Fitch (2002), he boils down all the unique properties of human languages into recursion. A distinction is made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN) in the above paper. And recursion has been regarded as the uniquely human component of FLN.The current study adopts the recursion-only claim. We believe that it is recursion that distinguishes human languages from animal communication, and relative clauses can manifest the property of recursion clearly. We propose that it is necessary to differentiate the notions of self-embedding and recursion first, and then make a distinction between the mechanism and manifestation of recursion. In this study, a cross-linguistic survey is conducted to investigate the recursive patterns of relative clauses in different languages. We argue that it is important to analyse relative clauses from their hierarchical structure instead of the linear order. In this way we find that the two test patterns in the experiment of Fitch and Hauser (2004) are problematic, in which the hierarchical generation process is overlooked. Even though it is difficult to put forward a unified recursive pattern for all the relative clauses in different languages since languages differ from each other in one way or another, however, it is clear to see that some languages share certain recursive patterns in relative clauses. Recursion truly plays a role in relative clauses and human languages. It is a necessary component of the faculty of human language.