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".
____________________________________________________________________________
Martin Wynne M.Wynne@lancaster.ac.uk
Grammarian phone: 01524 593881
Department of Linguistics and fax: 01524 593608
Modern English Language
Lancaster University Room: Secams A14
Lancaster
UK - LA1 4YT http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/eiamjw/
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