re: center embedding

Karl Teeter (kvt@husc.harvard.edu)
Wed, 13 Mar 1996 09:15:03 -0500 (EST)

This is the rat that the cat chased.
This is the dog that bit the cat that chased the rat.
This is the cow that tossed the dog that bit the cat that chased the rat.
These sentences are the basis of the truncated version of "The
House that Jack built" that has been under discussion these few days. The
last one relativizes to, I think: The rat the cat the dog the cow tossed
worried killed ate (NOT "the rat the cat the dog tossed bit chased",
which is gibberish). So this is a grammatical sentence. It does not
follow that it is easy to understand, or even understandable. Grammatical
sentences which cannot be understood are legion, as I believe has been
an established principle for forty years at least.

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
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>