Re: center embedding of relative clauses

Henry S. Thompson (ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)
Tue, 12 Mar 96 16:57:47 GMT

I wrote:
> I think it's perfectly possible to come up with acceptable
> center-embeddings. It's been remarked before that using certain
> pronouns and padding with adverbs improves things:
>
> The report which the paper nearly everybody reads regularly carried
> yesterday asserted that the end was in sight.

Patrick Juola replied:
> Excellent. Wonderful. What creative scientists we all are.
> So because someone's come up with a sentence that meets his
> introspective definition of "acceptable," there's no phenomenon
> here to explain?
>
> I personally find it interesting that two-level embedding requires
> no padding, while three or more levels require a lot of handwaving on
> the part of the person presenting the sentence. No one else finds
> this discontinuity worthy of investigation?

Sorry I was too brief -- I simply observed that people who
had not encountered this sort of data before were responding to the
problem on the basis of very decontextualised `flat' examples, which
encourage the belief that it's a very simple, all-or-nothing
depth-2-OK-depth-3-bad situation, so I provided a slightly more
plausible depth-3 example.

My point was precisely that there is NOT a discontinuity, there is a
gradient with an apparently quite complex parameterisation, certainly
worthy of investigation, and indeed already investigated by many.

ht