Jonathan Swift
There is no longest sentence in any language, because speakers can lengthen any sentence by various means, such as adding an adjective or adding clauses. Even childern know how to produce and understand very long sentences, and know how to make them ever longer, as illustrated by the childern's rhyme about the house that Jack built.
This is the farmer sowing the corn,
that kept the coock that crowed in the morn,
that waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the man all tattered and torn,
that kissed the maiden all forlorn,
that milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
that tossed the dog,
that worried the cat,
that killed the rat,
that ate the malt,
that lay in the house that Jack built.
This rhyme begins with This is the house that Jack built, continues by lengthening it to This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and so on.
Yuo can add any of the following to the beginning of the rhyme and still have a grammatical longer sentence :
I think that .....
What is the name of the unicorn that noticed that .......
Aks someone if ........
Do you know whether .......
This limiyless aspect of language is also reflected in phrase structure trees. We have seen that an NP may appear immediately under a PP, and this PP may occur immediately under a higher NP, as in the man the telescope. The complex (but comprehensible) noun phrase the magician with a pack of cards in his box, as shown in the following phrase structure tree, illustrates that one can repeat the number of NPs under PPs under NPs without a limit.
This phrase structure tree for the noun phrase illustrates that any syntactic category may be represented by a phrase structure tree, that is, be the topmost node. It also illustrates the repetition of the NP within PP within NP and so on.
The NP diagrammed above, though cumbersome, violates no rules of syntax and is a grammatical noun phrase. Moreover, it can be made even longer by expanding the final NP his box by adding another PP of tricks.
The repetition of categories within categories is common in all languages. It allows speakers to use the same syntactic categories several times, with several different functions, in the same sentence. Our brain capacity is finite, able to store only a finite number of categories and rules for their combination. Yet, with these finite means, an infinite a set of sentences can be represented.
All speakers of English have as part of their linguistic competence Their mental grammar the ability to put NPs in PPs in NPs ad infinitum. But as the structures grow longer and longer, they become inceasingly difficult to produce and understand. This could be due for hort-term memory limitations, muscular fatigue, breathlessness, or any number of performane factors.
Thus, while such rules give speakes access to infinitely many sentences, no speaker utters oe hears an infinite number in a lifetime; nor is any sentence infinite length, although in principle there is no upper limit on sentence length. this property of grammars also accounts for the creative aspect of language use, since it permits speakers to produce and understand sentences never spoken before.
