Center-embedding

Whenever two related events, each involving different entities, are perceived, preconditions at least adequate for center-embedding are at least present. Demonstrations #8 (THE BALL THE MAN BOUNCES HITS THE PLATE), #12-14 (THE BLACK BALL HITS THE BLUE BALL AND THEN THE BLUE BALL HITS THE ORANGE BALL), and # 18-20 (A BALL IS ON THE TUBE AND THE TUBE IS ON THE PLATE) all meet these conditions, e.g., for #12 the ball the black ball hits hits the orange ball and for # 18 the tube the ball is on is on the plate, but - despite my speakers all being involved in psycholinguistics and reasonably familiar with transformational linguistics - only a single subject produced center-embeddings (for #13 and # 20), and this happened to be my research assistant! This is mute testimony to the rather esoteric nature of such constructions, at least in Simply Describing.