Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Part I. Discussing the need for recursion on empirical grounds -- 1. Pirahã - in need of recursive syntax? -- 2. The fluidity of recursion and its implications -- 3. Syntactic recursion and iteration -- 4. Recursion in conversation: What speakers of Finnish and Japanese know how to do -- 5. What do you think is the proper place of recursion? Conceptual and empirical issues -- Part II. Formal Issues -- 6. Recursion and the infinitude claim -- 7. Just how big are natural languages? -- 8. Recursion, infinity, and modeling -- 9. How recursive is language? A Bayesian exploration -- Part III. Evolutionary Perspectives -- 10. Was recursion the key step in the evolution of the human language faculty? -- 11. When clauses refuse to be recursive: An evolutionary perspective -- 12. The use of formal language theory in studies of artificial language learning: A proposal for distinguishing the differences between human and nonhuman animal learners -- 13. Over the top: Recursion as a functional option -- Part IV. Recursion and the Lexicon -- 14. Lack of recursion in the lexicon: The two-argument restriction -- 15. Kinds of recursion in Adyghe morphology -- 16. Recursion and the Lexicon -- Part V. Recursion outside Syntax -- 17. A note on recursion in phonology -- 18. Cognitive grouping and recursion in prosody -- 19. Becoming recursive: Toward a computational neuroscience account of recursion in language and thought -- 20. Recursion in severe agrammatism -- Backmatter