In this review we re-evaluate the recursion-only hypothesis, advocated by Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002; Fitch, Hauser & Chomsky, 2005). According to the recursion-only hypothesis, the property that distinguishes human language from animal communication systems is recursion, which refers to the potentially infinite embedding of one linguistic representation within ano...

We present a type-logical account of anaphora. The principal means is the introduction of type-constructors for`secondary wrap': wrap around the second of two split points in a discontinuous string. We illustrate in terms of preevaluated proof nets, proof nets in which lexico-syntactic interaction is computed in a lexical compilation rather than at the stage of derivation. We suggest that the a...

This paper takes as its starting point the observation that something is wrong with a Minimal Link Condition (MLC) in a derivational grammar. Brody (2001) argues that a derivational approach to syntax should minimize search space, its representational residue; thus, the amount of structure that is visible and accessible to syntactic operations at any given step should be as small as possible. G...

The first part of this article gives a brief overview of the four levels of the Chomsky hierarchy, with a special emphasis on context-free and regular languages. It then recapitulates the arguments why neither regular nor context-free grammar is sufficiently expressive to capture all phenomena in the natural language syntax. In the second part, two refinements of the Chomsky hierarchy are revie...

The recent work on automata whose variables and parameters are real numbers has focused largely on questions about computational complexity and tractability. It is also revealing to examine the metric relations that such systems induce on automata via the natural metrics on their parameter spaces. This brings the theory of computational classiication closer to theories of learning and statistic...

The characterization of the structure of palindromic regular and palindromic context-free languages is described by S. Horváth, J. Karhumäki, and J. Kleijn in 1987. In this paper alternative proofs are given for these characterizations.