Re: center embedding of relative clauses

Martin Wynne (eiamjw@comp.lancs.ac.uk)
Mon, 11 Mar 1996 15:18:13 +0000 (GMT)

> Hey, Rob, I don't quite get the point, since both of these are perfectly
> grammatical and understandable English sentences...the cow the rat the
> cat the dog tossed bit chased ate, etc., may be a bit more difficult. but
> are still perfectly grammatical...Yours, kvt (Karl V. Teeter, Professor
> of Linguistics, Emeritus, Harvard University)

I'd be amazed if anyone produced a real-life example of such a sentence
occurring outside of a syntax textbook; or if anyone produced respondent test
results that show that anyone understands them. As a native speaker, I find
them completely unnatural and meaningless.

However that is not to say that it is impossible to get 2 levels of centre
embedding in English. I found the following (debatable!) example in the British
National Corpus:

Already the "What I want for Christmas" letters are pouring into
Mr. Brooke, although the goodies (we don't know for certain what
they will amount to - that would spoil the surprise - but if we
are lucky they may amount to £36 million per sector) will
not be dispensed with for two years at least.

[File CKT, from the ART NEWSPAPER, 1993]

Here the 2 levels of parenthesis (one with brackets, one with dashes) mark two
levels of centre embedding. I think that it is interesting that the embeddings
are explicitly marked with punctuation, yet when I read it I still had to look
back to "goodies" when I got to "will".

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Martin Wynne M.Wynne@lancaster.ac.uk
Grammarian phone: 01524 593881
Department of Linguistics and fax: 01524 593608
Modern English Language
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Lancaster
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