Recursion

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Recursion is a process or result of elements recurring in a structure. Recursion allows structure to become of unbounded length.

Example

Compounding in English is recursive as is shown by the examples in (i): the concatenation of nouns can go on forever.

(i)   film society
    > student film society
    > student film society committee
    > student film society committee scandal
    > student film society committee scandal inquiry > etc.

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic structures, Mouton, The Hague.
• Spencer, A. 1991. Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford.