Courtroom attire
"Are you wearing a thong, madam?"
"A traditional one among my people, yes."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a hula hoop festooned with a hemp rope sling."
"What does 'festooned' mean?"
"I don't know."
Posted on 08/05/2019 7:53:05 AM PDT by BenLurkin
While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS).
" Flexible object combination and nesting (otherwise known as recursion) are characteristic features of all human languages. For this reason, linguists refer to modern languages as recursive languages."
Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one's lifetime, there is a strong critical period for the development of PFS and individuals not exposed to conversations with recursive language in early childhood can never acquire PFS as adults. Their language is always lacking understanding of spatial prepositions and recursion that depend on the PFS ability. In a similar manner, pre-modern humans would not have been able to learn recursive language as adults and, therefore, would not be able to teach recursive language to their own children, who, as a result, would not acquire PFS. Thus, the existence of a strong critical period for PFS acquisition creates a cultural evolutionary barrier for acquisition of recursive language.
The second predicted evolutionary barrier was a faster PFC maturation rate and, consequently, a shorter critical period. In modern children the critical period for PFS acquisition closes around the age of five. If the critical period in pre-modern children was over by the age of two, they would have no chance of acquiring PFS. A longer critical period was imperative to provide enough time to train PFS via recursive conversations.
An evolutionary mathematical model, developed by Dr. Vyshedskiy... suggests that the "PFC delay" mutation triggered simultaneous synergistic acquisition of PFS and recursive language.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Here’s an example from every day speaking:
“In English, recursion is often used to create expressions that modify or change the meaning of one of the elements of the sentence. For example, to take the word nails and give it a more specific meaning, we could use an object relative clause such as that Dan bought, as in
Hand me the nails that Dan bought.
In this sentence, the relative clause that Dan bought (which could be glossed as Dan bought the nails) is contained within a larger noun phrase: the nails (that Dan bought (the nails)). So the relative clause is nested within a larger phrase, kind of like a stack of bowls.”(Matthew J. Traxler, Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Understanding Language Science. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)
Or even more to point of survival: “Hand me your extra spear so we can circle around both sides of the herd and kill that small mammoth nearest the rock pile. Does that example work?
The sine qua non of recursive
is Chimera, by John Barth, which,
hilariously, Amazon lists as $68.55
for a hardback.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28Barth_novel%29
like a stack of bowls.
Sure would!
Better yet (and more recursive), “Grab that spear you used to kill that saber tooth last week because there’s another one behind you!”
Eeeewwww....
Stomach festering!
Ha! The example of recursion that you provided illustrates the concept perfectly.
I just had never heard it called “recursion” before.
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