Acquisition of Recursion in Child Mandarin

Recursion is the core of language ability.1 Every language exhibits recursion from the first stage of productive two-word utterances because elementary Merge entails recursion. However, Category Recursion (Chomsky, Gallego, & Ott, 2019) or Indirect Recursion (Snyder & Roeper, 2003) shows extensive language variation: English and German compounds, and adjectives, are recursive to the left, but French allows no adjective or compound recursion on the left, (except non-recursive lexical exceptions). English, but not German, allows left-branching possessives. German, but not Swedish has a lexical restriction to Proper Names for the Saxon Genitive: Maria’s Haus (‘Maria’s house’) but not *Maria’s Freund’s Haus (‘Maria’s friend’s house’). Dutch appears to be variable in how much non-Proper Nouns are allowed (neighbor, for instance) (Merx, 2016). Romanian does not allow recursive PP’s. Kalmak allows single complements, but does not allow recursive ones. Germanic has recursive compounds (‘coffeemaker-maker’), but not Romance. Therefore, an acquisition challenge exists: the child must acquire – must select – his grammar from a large range of alternatives. Grasping the acquisition path for recursion across diverse language types is a formidable theoretical challenge, still in its infancy. We focus on one corner in a growing literature on possessive recursion – Chinese and English – each of which is morphologically marked: