Suggested Answers for Check Questions

A rewrite rule can be recursive, which means that it can contain the same symbol on both sides, e.g. sentence → word*, sentence*. This rule states that a sentence can contain another sentence, an embedded sentence. Recursive rules can be applied again and again. It is the presence of such rules that accouts for how a finite system (remember, the number of rules is finite, and the lexicon, however big, also contains a finite number of elements) can be turned into an infinite one, since human languages are limitless.