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Research on complex structures in language and cognition is now reaching a point where the various types of complexity can begin to be defined with sufficient precision to consolidate results and discover the sources and limits of complex human cognition The workshop will feature invited speakers from linguistics, biology, psychology, philosophy and computer science, with a panel discussion of topics such as:

• Is recursion found in non-human animals, or in human nonlinguistic cognitive abilities?
• What is the extent of crosslinguistic variation in the structures showing recursion? Are there languages that lack recursion altogether?
• Some versions of minimalist syntax do not make use of syntactic category labels, and some make crucial use of phases, which do not have a clear syntactic status. What formal mechanisms are necessary for an explanatory account of linguistic recursion?
• What is the source of the apparent correlation between the acquisition of certain recursive sentence structures and cognitive processes like False Belief reasoning?
• Certain linguistic domains such as argument structure and paradigm representation reveal a striking lack of recursion. How are these constraints related to the constraints other cognitive domains?

Our ultimate goal is to refine our knowledge of the formal basis for learning language and start to project that model into the larger sphere of general cognition.