Dialects: Rel. clause subj. in interr.?

[Randy Alexander]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>> At 9:08 PM +0000 6/4/10, RonButters wrote:
>>>> "unacceptable" means that they follow regular grammatical rules but
>>>> are hard to process. Like, "the horse raced by the barn fell" and
>>>> "the oyster the oyster split split"
>>>
>>> Rigbt, and the center-embedding effect with those starred examples
>>> below prompts such a diagnosis, in which case they would end up
>>> trading in their * for a #. Ā The same remedies apply, so just as
>>> extraposition helps on the ones below ("Did it please you than John
>>> showed up?"), turning the center embedding into right branching
>>> structures ("The cheese that was eaten by the rat that was chased by
>>> the cat that was hassled by the dog was rancid" as opposed to "*The
>>> cheese that the cat that the dog hassled chased ate was rancid").
>>>
>>> LH
>>
>> I think there should be more to that last sentence.
>
> indeed. Â it's missing a subject, in this case "the rat", supplying a rat to eat the cheese and be chased by the cat:
>
> Â the cheese [1] that the rat [2] that the cat [3] that was hassled [4] by the dog [4]
> Â chased [3] ate [2] was rancid [1]
>
> arnold
>

Ha; that too.  :)

I didn't catch that.  The one I meant was the non-parenthetical last
sentence: "The same remedies apply, so just as X, Y.

X = extraposition helps on the ones below, turning the center
embedding into right branching structures

Y = ???

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
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