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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Center-embedding in natural language grammar should not be regarded as grammatical beyond depth 3 (depth 2 for spoken language)

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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