About center embedding of relative clauses
There is a more general way to talk about competence and performance:
competence is a THEORY of language abilities. So is the discussed
rule of central emmbedding. Then there are (EMPIRICAL) OBSERVATIONS
that confirm or not the theory. These observations are limited to
the performance of speakers; they can be quite different:
- observations in corpora, with or without counting occurrences,
that is, with or witouht statistics,
- examples constructed by professional linguists which are
submitted to acceptability judgments, again, statistically to a
population of lay speakers, or not statistically when discussed by
specialists of the field who agree on common methods.
I don t know whether this clarifies the debate
maurice gross