Recursion in Natural Languages

The received view is that there are no grammatical constraints on clausal embedding complexity in sentences in languages of the ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) type like English, Finnish, and Russian. The foremost proponent of this thesis is Noam Chomsky. This hypothesis of unbounded clausal embedding complexity is closely related to the hypothesis of unbounded syntactic recursion.

Psycholinguistic experimentation in the 1960’s established that there are clear performance-related preferences especially regarding center-embedding. The acceptability of repeated center-embeddings (nesting) below depth 1 steeply decreases with each successive level of embedding.

Not much corpus-based work has been done to find out what the empirical ‘facts’ of clausal embedding complexity are. I have conducted extensive corpus studies of English, Finnish, German, Latin, and Swedish, with the aim of determining the most complex clausal embedding patterns actually used. The basic constraint on nested center-embedding in written language turns out to be two (with a marginal cline to three), in spoken language one. There are further specific restrictions on which types of clauses may be nested. The practical limit of final embedding (right-branching) is five. Repeated initial embedding (left-branching) of clauses below depth two is not possible.

These written language constraints were reached already in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Latin along with the advent of written language and have remained the same ever since.

The constraints on center-embedding imply that SAE syntax is finite-state, type 3 in the Chomsky hierarchy. Clause-level recursion is thus not unbounded. The special case of right-branching relative clauses is rather an instance of depth-preserving iteration.