I used to take a magazine called Games & Puzzles which ran for 1972 until 1981 and it was there (I believe) that I read about an amazing way to construct a sentence in which arbitrarily many verbs appeared consecutively.
I recalled this recently but I'd forgotten the construction and for a while wasn't very successful when I searched online, but I've found it now. It's called center‑embedding and I thought it would be interesting to apply it to the nursery rhyme "This Is The House That Jack Built". So I did that, which was quite tricky, and then asked Copilot if the result was a legitimate sentence. Copilot said it was but commented
This type of structure is famous in linguistics: it’s grammatical in principle, but humans struggle to process more than one or two levels of embedding. Your sentence pushes it to the extreme for rhetorical effect (and fun).
Here is my sentence, with 9 consecutive verbs. Get ready.
The rat that the cat that the dog that the cow with the crumpled horn that the maiden all forlorn that man all tattered and torn that the priest all shaven and shorn that the cock that crowed in the morn that the farmer sowing his corn kept woke married kissed milked tossed worried killed ate the malt.
On its own initiative Copilot (very helpfully I thought) drew this diagram to clarify the structure.
Games & Puzzles Magazine and an Amazing Sentence
I used to take a magazine called Games & Puzzles which ran for 1972 until 1981 and it was there (I believe) that I read about an amazing way to construct a sentence in which arbitrarily many verbs appeared consecutively.
I recalled this recently but I'd forgotten the construction and for a while wasn't very successful when I searched online, but I've found it now. It's called center‑embedding and I thought it would be interesting to apply it to the nursery rhyme "This Is The House That Jack Built". So I did that, which was quite tricky, and then asked Copilot if the result was a legitimate sentence. Copilot said it was but commented
On its own initiative Copilot (very helpfully I thought) drew this diagram to clarify the structure.