Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Linguistics humor

A stacked relative clause construction (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT. A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:
It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.
Lifted from Charles Fillmore's contribution to Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday, via John Lawler.

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