Taylor Chen

This Is the House That Jack Built

There is a popular British nursery rhyme called This Is the House That Jack Built. It goes like this,

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that chased the rat
That ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat
That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

And so on…

What’s interesting about the nursery rhyme is that at this point the cheese could be described as
>the cheese the rat the cat the dog worried chased ate

Don’t worry if you found that confusing – it’s confusing for most people! What’s happening here is a process of center embedding and it quickly becomes super confusing after just two iteration of embedding relative clauses. It’s worth noting is that this sentence is grammatically correct but double center-embedding is generally not accepted in linguistics.

Using the full nursery rhyme the cheese would be referred to as
>The cheese the rat the cat the dog the cow the maiden the man the judge the cock the farmer owned woke married kissed milked tossed worried chased ate!

Good luck making sense of that! ;)