Re: misc responses to And #2

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

> >> I again cite center embedding as a well-known example both of the limits
> >> of recursion and of formal grammatical structures.
> >That's no good. I've already told you that's a special case. Plus,
> >centre embedding does not result in nonsense, though it does result
> >in unacceptability.
> As far as I am concerned,as a native English speaker, a 10-level center
> embeddding is just as much nonsense as, for example, taking a perfectly
> grammatical sentence and writing the words in reverse order.

Your being a native english speaker does not give your views on this
matter weight. The answer to whether it is or isn't nonsense is a
theoretical, possibly definitional, one; obviously the answer I
consider correct is the one I've already given, for reasons I've
already given.

> One happens to be permitted by Chomskyan recursive transformations,
> and the other is not, but neither is acceptable, grammtical or whatever.

Everyone agrees they're unacceptable. As I've already said, whether
it's grammatical is a theoretical matter; your views count only if
you're being a theoretician. I myself consider it grammatical, and
that remains the prevailing view.

---
And