Is the number of discontinuities unbounded?

[Mark Donohue]

(sorry - no personal reply address given, and Im don't know who "John" is)

> I am interested in knowing whether there are languages that allow a constituent
> to be split up into an unbounded number of pieces. 
I wasn't aware that the languages which do allow discontiguous 
constituents had any restrictions on the degree of discontinuity.
In any case, I know tht Dixon (1972, somewhere) cites a Dyirbal example 
with about 4+ elements all scrambled about.
N Kanum (southern New Guinea) you could easily get a sentence with 4+ 
elements scrambled about the place, something like

nsa^ne-w ywry nta^p-w kwr pyengkw  ka"lymw-ny krar-w
my-ERG   bit  big-ERG pig that:ERG bush-LOC   dog-ERG
'That big dog of mine bit a pig in the bush.'
 (yesterday; tense from verb-form)

Toss in more modifiers of krarw, and you can (with enough other elements 
to separate them, maybe 'mantena' 'yesterday', or something else), have n 
discontinuous elements.

ave fun,

Mark Donohue
donohue at cheops.anu.edu.au