On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:26:25 -0800, castironpi wrote:
> Humans have enormous "mental stacks"--- the stacks the contexts the
> speakers speak in push things they're hearing on to.
This is not true.
Human beings have extremely shallow mental stacks, limited by short-term
memory. Most people are capable of keeping seven, plus or minus two,
items in short term memory at once. Any more than that and they are
subject to fading away or being over-written.
Grammatically, it doesn't take many levels to confuse most people, and
even the best and brightest can't keep track of hundreds of levels, let
alone "enormous" numbers. At least, not unless you consider five to be
enormous.
Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" has some excellent examples of
such "top heavy" phases, such as:
He gave the girl that he met in New York while visiting
his parents for ten days around Christmas and New
Year's the candy.
She saw the matter that had caused her so much anxiety
in former years when she was employed as an efficiency
expert by the company through.
Fortunately the English grammar, which is very strict about word order
(Pinker describes it as "tyrannical") allows alternate forms that are
easier for our shallow stacks to deal with:
He gave the candy to the girl that he met in New York
while visiting his parents for ten days around
Christmas and New Year's.
She saw the matter through that had caused her so much
anxiety in former years when she was employed as an
efficiency expert by the company through.
Pinker also describes situations where the words can be grouped into
phrases as you go, and so are easy to comprehend:
Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing
of the hummingbird.
and a counter-example of a perfectly grammatical sentence, with only
THREE levels, which is all but unintelligible:
The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the
hummingbird has has has is remarkable.
These nested "onion sentences" are exceedingly difficult for the human
brain to parse. In fact, I'm betting that at least 90% of people will, on
first reading, will question whether it could possibly be grammatically
correct.
--
Steven
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