Dialects: Rel. clause subj. in interr.?

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Sat Jun 5 13:33:02 UTC 2010


On Jun 5, 2010, at 6:14 AM, Randy Alexander wrote:

> 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 #.  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.  it's missing a subject, in this case "the rat", supplying a rat to eat the cheese and be chased by the cat:
>>
>>   the cheese [1] that the rat [2] that the cat [3] that was hassled [4] by the dog [4]
>>   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 = ???

Y = reordering NP subjects so that the relative clauses are right-branching helps in The House That Jack Built examples ("the dog that hassled the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese that was rancid").

so there's missing material, of two different kinds -- one in the text itself, one in the quoted example,

arnold

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