The language recursion wars

[wigginhall]

Hot dang, I'm just gonna have to mosey over to those linguistics stacks, and read up about the data.   I may be some time.

[jeremyp]

Reading around further, I notice that David Pesetsky, an American linguist, has argued that Everett has left out a mass of contradictory data, in other words, examples of recursion in this language.   If this is correct, it's a killer argument, but I am certainly not going to chase up all the details, as I am not being paid!  Pesetsky's argument can be found in the comments here:

http://www.chronicle.com/article/angry-words/131260

And there is further stuff under the Wiki entry on Pesetsky, e.g. 

http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411

The point of the article was not whether Everett was right or wrong, but the that the nature of the opposition was not scientific. i.e. people apparently resorted to trying to shout him down.