This book provides a comprehensive account of the role of recursion in language in two distinct but interconnected ways. First, David J. Lobina examines how recursion applies at different levels within a full description of natural language. Specifically, he identifies and evaluates recursion as: a) a central property of the computational system underlying the faculty of language; b) a possible feature of the derivations yielded by this computational system; c) a global characteristic of the structures generated by the language faculty; and d) a probable factor in the parsing operations employed during the processing of recursive structures. Second, the volume orders these different levels into a tripartite explanatory framework. According to this framework, the investigation of any particular cognitive domain must begin by first outlining what sort of mechanical procedure underlies the relevant capacity (including what sort of structures it generates). Only then, the author argues, can we properly investigate its implementation, both at the level of abstract computations typical of competence-level analyses, and at the level of the real-time processing of behaviour.

"it provides a novel way to probe the link between linguistic competence and performance, and the relation between recursion and Merge ... the book keeps the central principles of current biolinguistics by sticking to a bottom-up approach to syntactic building, and focusing on dynamic syntactic derivations. This may bring about dramatic and interesting changes in the thoughts of constructing syntactic theory ... the book offers very thought-provoking insights into the research of recursion." - Juan Luo, Journal of Linguistics