As for whether this sentence "ever occurs", I am a native speaker
of English and I just wrote it above, so it has indubitably occurred. As
for the "BNC sampler" I don't know what it is, but give me a live speaker
any day. Thanks. KVT
If there is something else we are talking about and I am not
catching on, I stand ready for enlightenment.
Karl V. Teeter kvt@husc.harvard.edu
Grammarian phone (617)495-8888
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus
Harvard University
Widener Library Room T
Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. 02138
On Tue, 12 Mar 1996, Martin Wynne wrote:
> I've looked in the BNC Sampler for centre embeddings of the type:
>
> the cow the rat the cat the dog tossed bit chased ate
>
> The corpus is a representative sample of various types of contemporary written
> British English comprising 1 million words tagged for part of speech to a very
> high (99% plus) degree of accuracy.
>
> There is only one occurrence of more than two consecutive finite verbs, in the
> sentence:
>
> We were all shouting "BURN BURN BURN BURN BURN BURN BURN."
>
> where there are in fact seven, but there is no centre embedding.
>
> There are cases of one level of centre embedding with no punctuation, relatives
> or adverbs, e.g.:
>
> The method we used leads to an increase...
>
> although remarkably no patterns "(determiner) noun (determiner) noun verb verb"
> such as:
>
> the rat the cat ate was fat
>
> although there was the slightly more complex:
>
> ...whose existence many first team players feel would hinder their prospects...
>
> I think that this evidence suggests at least that sentences of the type "the rat
> the cat ate was fat" are carefully avoided in written English. I still await
> evidence that "the rat the cat the dog tossed bit chased" ever occur.
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> 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/
> ____________________________________________________________________________
>