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    Deep center-embedding constructions are extraordinarily d... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Deep center-embedding constructions are extraordinarily difficult to process

    Philosophy of Language
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Depth-3 center-embedded sentences such as 'Vehicles that engineers who car companies trust build crash every day' are semantically plausible yet practically incomprehensible
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    • 2.Such sentences virtually never occur even in writing
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Processing difficulty is gradient and context-dependent, not binary; trained readers parse depth-3 embeddings with moderate effort given typographic or prosodic cues.
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    • 2.Fodor and Frazier's garden-path research shows parsing difficulty dissipates upon re-analysis, indicating temporary load rather than principled incomprehensibility.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Rarity of occurrence in corpora conflates performance limitations with competence constraints, a distinction Chomsky's generative framework explicitly warns against.
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    • 2.A construction's absence from natural usage cannot establish cognitive inaccessibility, since frequency reflects pragmatic and stylistic pressures independent of grammatical processing capacity.
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    Related

    A construction's absence from natural usage cannot establish cognitive inaccessi...Depth-3 center-embedded sentences such as 'Vehicles that engineers who car compa...Fodor and Frazier's garden-path research shows parsing difficulty dissipates upo...Processing difficulty is gradient and context-dependent, not binary; trained rea...
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    Rarity of occurrence in corpora conflates performance limitations with competenc...Such sentences virtually never occur even in writing

    Similar

    Depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare in naturally composed t...83%No genuine depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred in naturally com...74%Depth-3 center-embedded sentences such as 'Vehicles that engineers who...65%[6c1] is accessible to [6c2] because every embedding function consider...64%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    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
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

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