center embedding: what is of interest?

Eileen Prince Lou (eprince@lynx.dac.neu.edu)
Mon, 11 Mar 1996 11:37:39 -0500 (EST)

Grammaticality is not really the issue with center-embedding, as
Professor Teeter has pointed out. Since my personal parsing device
can't handle too many instances, I'll refer to the double cases such as:

The cat the dog the rat bit chased ran (or whatever)

Yes, this is probably not easily comprehended by untrained native
speakers of English.

However, consider the grammatically parallel:

The lunch the chef the new owner hired prepared reeked.

Here, cues beyond the grammatical allow us to figure out what happened
and processing is far easier.

I do agree that the likelihood of such sentences occurring is small, but
the grammar does correctly account for them. So, there is obviously
more to what we can and cannot say/process than grammaticality. Our
perceptual strategies, which influence and are probably influenced by
production constraints are very important, perhaps moreso.

BTW, I still remember the following example given by Professor Thomas
Bever at Columbia:

The oyster the oyster the oyster split split split.

Best,

Eileen Prince Lou
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