Problem 1.1 Recursion is the property of allowing a phrase of label X to contain as a proper subpart another phrase of label X, as in exercise 1.4. This property allows a grammar to license phrases/sentences of unbounded length with a finite vocabulary. Without recursion, languages would contain only simple phrases and only a finite number of them. However, syntactic constituent structure is a prerequisite for compositional semantics even of simple phrases and provides the hierarchical structure on which recursion is defined. Hence, syntactic structure is more basic than recursion.