07.02.2017Recursion in language evolution: new paper by IVS team accepted by "Language”

Department members Manuel Widmer, Paul Widmer and Balthasar Bickel wrote a paper together with Sandra Auderset (UC Santa Barbara) and Johanna Nichols (UC Berkeley) where they show that despite extreme volatility and diversity, Indo-European NPs are strongly attracted to recursive structures over time. The paper is accepted for publication in Language.

A prepublication draft can be accessed here:

NPrecursion_FinalMS (PDF, 3 MB)