![]() And this is what a recursive definition or a recursive function does: It is "running back" or returning to itself. The adjective "recursive" originates from the Latin verb "recurrere", which means "to run back". We have to stop our short excursion to the use of recursion in natural language to come back to recursion in computer science and programs and finally to recursion in the programming language Python. And if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible thoughts and intentions is infinite too, because virtually every sentence expresses a different thought or intention."1 Indeed, the repertoire of sentences is theoretically infinite, because the rules of language use a trick called recursion.Ī recursive rule allows a phrase to contain an example of itself, as in She thinks that he thinks that they think that he knows and so on, ad infinitum. ![]() The possible combinations quickly multiply out to unimaginably large numbers. The cognitive scientist and linguist Stephen Pinker phrases it like this: "With a few thousand nouns that can fill the subject slot and a few thousand verbs that can fill the predicate slot, one already has several million ways to open a sentence. Even with a very simple grammar rule, like "An English sentence contains a subject and a predicate, and a predicate contains a verb, an object and a complement", we can demonstrate the infinite possibilities of the natural language. Our way of thinking is based on a recursive thinking processes. Recursion is not only a fundamental feature of natural language, but of the human cognitive capacity. We think that, you think, we convinced you now that, we can go on forever with this example of a recursion from natural language. He is sure I think I know recursion has something to do with infinity. I think I know recursion has something to do with infinity. ![]() ![]() I know recursion has something to do with infinity. Recursion has something to do with infinity. ![]()
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