“One can define recursion as demonstrating an understanding of something as complex as ‘This is the cat that bit the rat that ate the cheese that lived in the house that Jack built,’ so that no non-human could succeed.”

Ferdinand de Saussure. He thought of language as being an exchange between a sender and a receiver, whose roles were analogous to the Morse code operators who transmitted messages over the radio during wartime.

Imagine a net with big holes cast over a piece of earth. It falls, wrinkled in some places, straight in others, the squares distorted into jagged or compressed spaces. If the earth represents thought, then the squares of the net represent words—dividing up the territory unequally and in a somewhat haphazard way. Every different language is another

Chomsky’s theory went through several incarnations, each, in general, more rigorous and pared back than the previous one.§ The final iteration, known as the “minimalist program,” introduces what Chomsky believes to be the most basic rule of human language, that which ultimately generates all the sentences of all known languages, and which allows a

“politeness principle” to accompany the “cooperative principle”: those of tact (try to minimize the cost to the other), generosity (maximize the cost to self), approbation (maximize praise of other), modesty (minimize praise of self), agreement (minimize disagreement) and sympathy (minimize antipathy).

Wittgenstein’s crucial insight. Although he had it seventy years ago, it’s hard to find a better account for the many different ways in which we deploy words: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

Noam Chomsky. In 1965, he wrote: “A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting grammars and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state . . . leave little hope that much of the structure of

So what is the “feel” of a word, and how can you distinguish it from the thing being pointed at? One way to answer this question is to imagine that names have both a “sense’§ and a “reference,” which together make up the meaning. “Steed,” “mount” and “gee-gee” have different senses (ways in which they are presented) but the same “reference,” that

This “usage-based” theory of language structure doesn’t require us to imagine a UG. It instead posits a universal set of constraints on language use: the need to be clear and expressive, but also efficient. And, as long as they don’t actually impede communication, certain structures will just endure, the baroque overdecoration characteristic of