In 2002, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch hypothesized that the narrow faculty of language “only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.” This hypothesis led to a rich research program that challenges this claim and aims to discover the formal properties of the narrow faculty of language and explores the ways in which the narrow language faculty interfaces with language use and interpretation systems.

The papers in this well-edited and well-written book are the results of a 2009 conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The conference brought together specialists in computational linguistics, syntax, language acquisition, psychology, semantics, biology, and philosophy with the goal of developing an interdisciplinary approach to support or refute the claims made by the original Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis. In the discussion at the conference, three distinct themes emerged: direct versus indirect recursion and labeling; constraints on recursion--functional categories and the lexicon; and conditions imposed by the interfaces.

This volume contains 11 research papers and is not divided further along these themes. There is however an additional, excellent introduction by Margaret Speas that organizes and summarizes the papers around computational questions; syntactic questions; and interfaces, acquisition, and evolution.

While in some cases the practice of publishing a relatively loose collection of research papers in book form can be questionable, this is certainly not the case here. The excellent introductory paper by Speas puts the following main research papers in context by summarizing their main ideas and contributions. This motivates readers to further explore the ideas of the authors and allows readers to quickly discover papers that may interest them.

Overall, I highly recommend this well-edited collection to researchers and students interested in this topic.