[lit-ideas] The House That Jack Built
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:15:27 EDT
I cannot find the examples by Ziff, if Ziff it was; perhaps it was Zipf.
Who knows. I tend to remember it was an American thing.
----
I wrote recently on 'mise-en-abyme'. I used Grice's example of
psycholinguistic processing. Grice refers to w'ffn proof, too!
Anyway, this in wiki under recursion may serve to refute Witters on not
having a clear concept of 'sentence':
---
Linguist Noam Chomsky theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such
as English is possible only by the recursive device of embedding sentences
in sentences. Thus, a chatty person may say, "Dorothy, who met the wicked
Witch of the West in Munchkin Land where her wicked Witch sister was
killed, liquidated her with a pail of water." Clearly, two simple sentences —
"Dorothy met the Wicked Witch of the West in Munchkin Land" and "Her sister
was killed in Munchkin Land" — can be embedded in a third sentence, "Dorothy
liquidated her with a pail of water," to obtain a very verbose sentence.
However, if "Dorothy met the Wicked Witch" can be analyzed as a simple
sentence, then the recursive sentence "She lived in the house Jack built"
could be analyzed that way too, if "Jack built" is analyzed as an adjective,
"Jack-built", that applies to the house in the same way "Wicked" applies to
the Witch. "She lived in the Jack-built house" is unusual, perhaps poetic
sounding, but it is not clearly wrong.
---
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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