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    Center-embedding in natural language grammar should not b... — Carmelics
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    Center-embedding in natural language grammar should not be regarded as grammatical beyond depth 3 (depth 2 for spoken language)

    Philosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare in naturally composed text
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    • 2.No genuine depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred in naturally composed text
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    • 3.A grammar should stay close to what performance data can confirm
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Chomsky's competence/performance distinction holds that grammatical rules describe an idealized speaker-hearer, not frequency in corpora.
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    • 2.Processing limitations (memory, attention) explain why deep embeddings are rare without implying they violate grammatical rules.
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    • 3.Collapsing competence into performance confuses the explanandum of linguistics with psycholinguistic processing constraints.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.A generative grammar's recursive rules derive their justification from formal systematicity and learnability, not from attestation in text.
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    • 2.Accepting unattested constructions as ungrammatical entails rejecting any novel sentence, which undermines the productivity of language.
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    Philosophy of Language

    Related

    A generative grammar's recursive rules derive their justification from formal sy...A grammar should stay close to what performance data can confirmAccepting unattested constructions as ungrammatical entails rejecting any novel ...Chomsky's competence/performance distinction holds that grammatical rules descri...
    +4 moreShow less
    Collapsing competence into performance confuses the explanandum of linguistics w...Depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare in naturally composed textNo genuine depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred in naturally composed textProcessing limitations (memory, attention) explain why deep embeddings are rare ...

    Similar

    A more 'user-friendly' conception of natural language grammars can be ...77%Children generalize beyond the primary linguistic data when learning g...75%What is part of the computational power of grammar belongs to grammar ...75%If an equally adequate formalization parallels grammatical structure, ...74%

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    SEP: linguistics
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    The claim that English is not accepted by any finite-state automaton can only be supported by showing that every grammar for English has center- embedding to an unbounded depth (see Levelt 2008: 20–23 for an exposition and proof of the relevant theorem, originally from Chomsky 1959). But even depth-3 center-embedding of clauses (a clause interrupting a clause that itself interrupts a clause) is in practice extraordinarily hard to process. Hardly anyone can readily understand even semantically pl
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    Details

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    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit