[plt-scheme] Re: Novice needs help writing function

From: Bill Wood (william.wood3 at comcast.net)
Date: Sun Dec 30 17:31:04 EST 2007

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 16:09 -0500, Todd O'Bryan wrote:
> Another place where recursion comes up regularly is in linguistics. A
> sentence is a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase. But both noun
> phrases and verb phrases can contain other sentences, which each
> contain a noun phrase and verb phrase and...well, you get the picture.
> Unfortunately, I can't at this moment think of a linguistics text that
> treats linguistic recursion in a fun way. You might try some of Steven
> Pinker's popular texts (The Language Instinct is a good one) and
> there's a great book by Randy Allen Harris called The Linguistic Wars,
> but I don't think either of them spends more than a few pages on the
> concept.

There's Robert Wall, _Introduction to Mathematical Linguistics_, Chap. 8
(Recursion), pp. 188--206.

For the real nitty-gritty there's always S.C.Kleene, _Introduction to
Metamathematics_, Part III (Recursive Functions), pp. 217--386.  This is
fairly hairy, though.

 -- Bill Wood




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