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I disagree, and FWIW, I find your tone hostile. A prescriptivist would say it follows allowed grammar rules but is still unintelligible. A descriptivist would

I disagree, and FWIW, I find your tone hostile. A prescriptivist would say it follows allowed grammar rules but is still unintelligible. A descriptivist would say it follows common usage patterns but takes it to such an extreme as to be unintelligible. You see this pattern more often with proper names: - That's the house Jack built. - That's the woman the house Jack built fell on. - That's the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired. - That's the briefcase the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired carried. At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to most native speakers? It's also worth noting these sentences seem much stranger in writing than they do when heard. In writing, most sane people will use punctuation in the examples above. But in speaking, our tone of voice conveys enough context to use more streamlined structures.

morgante 11y ago
> At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to most native speakers? Beyond 1 level of nesting. There's no rule allowing arbitrary nesting, nor do people commonly nest beyond 1 level. I'm not sure where you saw hostility in my comment.
- Tenhundfeld 11y ago
  Can you point me to the rule disallowing arbitrary nesting? I'm not aware of a rule existing in either direction, besides vague guidelines to write clearly. Also, which example is 1 level of nesting? I think "That's the woman the house Jack built fell on." is 2 levels nesting, and I frequently hear constructs like that – in speaking. I agree it's rarer in writing though. For example: What server is that? That's the server the consultant Jack brought in set up. I'd never write that, because it's confusing. But I will naturally say things like that, without any problem in clarity, because you have more granular control over grouping and pausing, etc. If I said a sentence like that, you might hear it more as "That's the server the-consultant-Jack-brought-in set up." Anyway, sorry if I misread your tone. It just came across very much as "I know what's right, and you're wrong." That might have been me projecting though. :)
- kenbellows 11y ago
  By and large, the rules I learned in various English and grammar classes, beyond the initial sentence structure, were prohibitive rather than permissive; there's no rule explicitly _allowing_ arbitrary nesting, because why would need a rule to specify that, but there's also no rule that I'm aware of that _prohibits_ arbitrary nesting. In fact, the "rule" that matters here is general sentence structure. It's fine to embed a single secondary clause inside a primary clause: That's the woman [the house Jack built] fell on. The structure of the inner clause has no further restrictions on it than the structure of the outer clause. Thus, the entire above sentence is perfectly valid as an inner clause to a new outer clause: That's the lawyer [the woman <the house Jack built> fell on] hired. There's nothing in any grammar book that I'm aware of explicitly prohibiting infinite nesting of this sort; it's just silly and quickly becomes unintelligible. Though I definitely take Tenhundfeld's point that this sort of structure is a lot more common in spoken language, and in fact it's a lot more easily comprehensible with the aid of vocal cues and tones.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  Saying it stops at level 1 implies the valid rule of embedding is a special case itself of an invalid general rule, rather than it being a general rule itself. If the special case is the most common case, does that really imply only the special case is valid? Why?
- canjobear 11y ago
  There's empirical work on this [1] (alas, paywalled): multiple center embedding in speech is rare but exists. It is more common in writing. There are examples of 2 levels of center-embedding which are clearly grammatical and not hard to understand: > Anyone [who saw the woman [who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned. Others are very hard to understand: > Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned. There are many factors that make a sentence hard to understand, not just degree of embedding. Some degree 2 sentences can be easy, and some degree 1 sentences can be hard (e.g. "the horse [raced past the barn] fell", which has only 1 level of embedding). So if you want to describe English with the rule "no embedding beyond 1 level" then you're going to miss a lot of valid sentences while also failing to rule out lots of invalid ones. Contrast this with a valid descriptive rule of English, such as "determiners such as 'the' always come before the nouns they modify". I can say "the man died", but "man the died" is never comprehensible under any circumstances and cannot be made better. No one would say that a sentence with 10 levels of embedding is perfectly fine English. But descriptively, you have the problem that there is no non-arbitrary upper bound on embedding degree: it's not clear when one more level of embedding takes you from grammatical to ungrammatical, and furthermore it depends on the contents of the embedded clauses. There is also some work I'm aware of, currently in prep for publication, showing that the extent to which people can understand multiply-embedded sentences strongly correlates with IQ (measured by Raven's matrices). All this suggests that the simplest descriptive rule is to say that English allows center-embedding recursively, but that there are human processing limitations on sentences that create very deep stacks. The "human processing limitations" part is basically the whole field of psycholinguistics: many details have been worked out, but many details are still sketchy. [1] Karlsson (2007): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1056752 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
  - morgante 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing the research, it's fascinating that there has actually been serious investigation of this. That being said, I still think the rule of 1 level still makes sense (not that all 1 level embeds are valid or easy, but that all embeds beyond 1 level are invalid). > Anyone [who saw [the woman who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned. That sentence has two complementisers, which the OP's sentence specifically did not. Introducing complementisers completely changes the rules and I think makes embedding much more possible.
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morgante 11y ago

> At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to most native speakers? Beyond 1 level of nesting. There's no rule allowing arbitrary nesting, nor do people commonly nest beyond 1 level. I'm not sure where you saw hostility in my comment.

Tenhundfeld 11y ago
Can you point me to the rule disallowing arbitrary nesting? I'm not aware of a rule existing in either direction, besides vague guidelines to write clearly. Also, which example is 1 level of nesting? I think "That's the woman the house Jack built fell on." is 2 levels nesting, and I frequently hear constructs like that – in speaking. I agree it's rarer in writing though. For example: What server is that? That's the server the consultant Jack brought in set up. I'd never write that, because it's confusing. But I will naturally say things like that, without any problem in clarity, because you have more granular control over grouping and pausing, etc. If I said a sentence like that, you might hear it more as "That's the server the-consultant-Jack-brought-in set up." Anyway, sorry if I misread your tone. It just came across very much as "I know what's right, and you're wrong." That might have been me projecting though. :)
kenbellows 11y ago
By and large, the rules I learned in various English and grammar classes, beyond the initial sentence structure, were prohibitive rather than permissive; there's no rule explicitly _allowing_ arbitrary nesting, because why would need a rule to specify that, but there's also no rule that I'm aware of that _prohibits_ arbitrary nesting. In fact, the "rule" that matters here is general sentence structure. It's fine to embed a single secondary clause inside a primary clause: That's the woman [the house Jack built] fell on. The structure of the inner clause has no further restrictions on it than the structure of the outer clause. Thus, the entire above sentence is perfectly valid as an inner clause to a new outer clause: That's the lawyer [the woman <the house Jack built> fell on] hired. There's nothing in any grammar book that I'm aware of explicitly prohibiting infinite nesting of this sort; it's just silly and quickly becomes unintelligible. Though I definitely take Tenhundfeld's point that this sort of structure is a lot more common in spoken language, and in fact it's a lot more easily comprehensible with the aid of vocal cues and tones.
Natanael_L 11y ago
Saying it stops at level 1 implies the valid rule of embedding is a special case itself of an invalid general rule, rather than it being a general rule itself. If the special case is the most common case, does that really imply only the special case is valid? Why?
canjobear 11y ago
There's empirical work on this [1] (alas, paywalled): multiple center embedding in speech is rare but exists. It is more common in writing. There are examples of 2 levels of center-embedding which are clearly grammatical and not hard to understand: > Anyone [who saw the woman [who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned. Others are very hard to understand: > Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned. There are many factors that make a sentence hard to understand, not just degree of embedding. Some degree 2 sentences can be easy, and some degree 1 sentences can be hard (e.g. "the horse [raced past the barn] fell", which has only 1 level of embedding). So if you want to describe English with the rule "no embedding beyond 1 level" then you're going to miss a lot of valid sentences while also failing to rule out lots of invalid ones. Contrast this with a valid descriptive rule of English, such as "determiners such as 'the' always come before the nouns they modify". I can say "the man died", but "man the died" is never comprehensible under any circumstances and cannot be made better. No one would say that a sentence with 10 levels of embedding is perfectly fine English. But descriptively, you have the problem that there is no non-arbitrary upper bound on embedding degree: it's not clear when one more level of embedding takes you from grammatical to ungrammatical, and furthermore it depends on the contents of the embedded clauses. There is also some work I'm aware of, currently in prep for publication, showing that the extent to which people can understand multiply-embedded sentences strongly correlates with IQ (measured by Raven's matrices). All this suggests that the simplest descriptive rule is to say that English allows center-embedding recursively, but that there are human processing limitations on sentences that create very deep stacks. The "human processing limitations" part is basically the whole field of psycholinguistics: many details have been worked out, but many details are still sketchy. [1] Karlsson (2007): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1056752 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
- morgante 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing the research, it's fascinating that there has actually been serious investigation of this. That being said, I still think the rule of 1 level still makes sense (not that all 1 level embeds are valid or easy, but that all embeds beyond 1 level are invalid). > Anyone [who saw [the woman who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned. That sentence has two complementisers, which the OP's sentence specifically did not. Introducing complementisers completely changes the rules and I think makes embedding much more possible.

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