About the adaptiveness of syntactic recursion - Commentary on F. Newmeyer: 'Cognitive and functional factors in the evolution of grammar'
Résumé
Recursion has a function: it gives a new role to predicates. The main predicate in a sentence expresses a thought for argumentative purposes. The main predicate is what is really meant, what is offered to the addressees' critique (in the case of argumentation) or to their appraisal (in the case of event report). Thanks to recursion, other predicates can be introduced to determine arguments. They help addressees determine what x refers to in the scene.