Difficult-to-understand sentences are mainly due to failure of syntax. When a sentence’s components don’t mesh together, its meaning gets lost or confused. You get run-on sentences, garden path sentences, and crash blossoms this way.
What is Center Embedding?
In linguistics, embedding is where you insert a clause within another. This creates a hierarchical structure, with the inserted clause subordinate to the primary unit (known as the superordinate clause).
Center embedding is specifically where a phrase or clause is inserted inside of another phrase or clause that is of the same type. This sometimes leads to complex and convoluted sentences.
For example, in the sentence “The thief that the kid saw was on foot,” the clause “that the kid saw” is nested within the larger clause “The thief was on foot.”
There’s not much issue in understanding this sentence. The problem starts when multiple clauses are embedded within one another. Like so:
- Two layers
- The thief [that the kid saw] ran away.
- Three layers
- The thief [that the kid [the police talked to] saw] ran away.
- Four layers
- The thief [that the kid [the police [the neighbor called] talked to] saw] ran away.
- Five layers
- The thief [that the kid [the police [the neighbor [the dog barked at] called] talked to] saw] ran away.
- Six layers
- The thief [that the kid [the police [the neighbor [the dog [that the cat scratched] barked at] called] talked to] saw] ran away.
Put another way, the cat scratched the dog. The dog barked at the neighbor. The neighbor was the one who called the police. The police talked to the kid who saw the thief. The thief had run away.
The Confusion
In theory, you can keep adding clauses within other clauses indefinitely. However, the more layers you add, the more difficult it becomes to understand the sentence’s meaning. Beyond three layers, the sentence seems to lose any coherence.
There’s no definite reason yet, but short-term memory seems to be the obvious cause. Your brain struggles to keep up with what’s going on. You lose track of the sentence’s components—which subject connects to which predicate, which verb is used by which noun, and so on.
This confusion is mostly on center embedding though. Take a look at these two sentences:
- The dog[that the boy[that the teacher caught] found] barked.
- The teacher [that caught the boy [that found the dog]]laughed.
Sentence 2 is more understandable than sentence 1. The reason is that the innermost clause is embedded at the edge and not the center of another clause.
Sentence 1 reads awkwardly because there are three strings of noun phrases and verbs right next to each other. You rarely find that in normal language.
Effective Embedding
Embedding in itself isn’t a problem. It is the excessive use of it that creates chaos. To avoid confusion, make sure that the subordinate clause shares a common element. Take, for example, the phrases “He entered the store” and “My brother owned it.”
The store is the common element. So the two can be combined into this sentence: “He entered the store that my brother owned.”
It also helps to embed a clause into a different type of clause. A relative clause (provides additional info about a noun and starts with a relative pronoun) doesn’t make sense when embedded into another relative clause:
“The book [that I [the librarian recommended] borrowed] is due today.”
Compare that to a relative clause that’s embedded into a complement clause (used to complement another word):
“The book [which I borrowed [that the librarian recommended] from the library] is due today.”
If you prefer not to go through all of that, then the most effective method to avoid confusion is to split your sentence into multiple sentences instead.
What’s your most confusing experience with center embedding? Share them in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:
- 10 Weird Sentences in The English Language
- The Garden Path Sentence: Getting Rid of Sentence Ambiguity
- Lexical Cloning: Definition and Examples
- Mixed Constructions: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
Cole is a blog writer and aspiring novelist. He has a degree in Communications and is an advocate of media and information literacy and responsible media practices. Aside from his interest in technology, crafts, and food, he’s also your typical science fiction and fantasy junkie, spending most of his free time reading through an ever-growing to-be-read list. It’s either that or procrastinating over actually writing his book. Wish him luck!
