*raises hand*
I get it!
Chomsky came up with a linguistic theory that a key part of human language, and what separated it from animal speech, was the possibility of recursion, the idea that linguistic structures like adjectives, sub-clauses, etc., can be... sorta... repeated within themselves? I don't know, I'm terrible at explaining things, look it up... But in essence, I could, say, theoretically make a single noun clause of infinite length (I met a man who had a wife who hated a kid who ... forever and ever, adding more sub-clauses). It would be really goddamn hard to keep track of, but it would be grammatically correct. According to some reports, though, Pirahã, a language in Brazil, lacks recursion, which would make Chomsky's theory of universal grammar much shakier.
