Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Is that a valid English sentence? Can you parse it if you haven’t had it explained to you before? (if you haven’t, try it with some extra words to help indicate the clauses: Buffalo buffalo that other Buffalo buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo other Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo. It also helps to know the transitive verb buffalo: to intimidate; to deceive or hoodwink; to confuse.)
There’s something that strikes me as fishy about sentences that are theoretically well-formed according to an analysis of the grammar, but no competent speaker could ever actually produce or parse without aid (such as pencil and paper or a computer program). The Buffalo sentence can actually probably be understood if spoken aloud by someone who understands it and punches it up with strategic pauses and stress. But it’s easy to imagine sentences where that’s impossible.
For instance, it seems to be relatively common to say something like:
Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, your great-great-great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve. - Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 123
In theory it may be limited only be the number of generations since Eve, but in actual practice I bet it’s limited to no more than will fit comfortably in iconic memory, and more than three is probably somebody deliberately being funny.
A Google search, restricted to English pages, gives:
||”great-(great)+ grand”| 209,000|
||”great-(great)+ grand”| 25,600|
||”great-great-(great)+ grand”| 5,740|
||”great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 933|
||”great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 389|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 269|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 196|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 131|
Beyond that Google drops terms, because the search string is limited to 10
But do people even read these many iterations of “great”? Can they? Again, my guess is that after a small number that they’re able to visually recognize, they either switch to counting (until they tire of that) or just give up, look for the next non-great and continue reading the sentence happily unconcerned with how many generations they’ve skipped. All competent speakers understand the rule that’s being used to generate these sequences, but I think they also all recognize that there comes a point where the speaker is using the rule correctly but breaking a meta-rule that the sentence be intended to be understandable.