Why a sentence can nest forever on paper but not in your head: centre-embedding
30seconds
The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt. It is perfectly grammatical, and almost nobody can read it. English lets you tuck one clause inside another without limit, but a reader has to keep every noun waiting until its verb finally arrives, in reverse order.
Build the sentence one nested level at a time, watch the pile of unfinished nouns grow, then chain the same words so each verb follows its noun. And see why a sentence with a verb missing can feel better than the complete one.
Deep dive · 4 min
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