Self-embedding

自嵌套

A term used in generative grammar to refer to a construction in which a constituent belonging to some category is inside a larger constituent of the same category; also known as centre-embedding. The process can continue indefinitely, but the acceptability of this construction deteriorates with the number of self-embeddings. These problems have stimulated considerable discussion concerning the psychological mechanisms that need to be assumed to explain linguistic behaviour, reference being made to alternative processes of sentence formation, such as right-branching and left-branching constructions.

生成语法中用来指一类构式，其派生过程涉及形式为X→Y+（X）+Z的结构操作；也称作中心嵌套。嵌套过程可不断继续下去，但随着嵌套次数的增多，构式的可接受性会逐渐下降。这类问题已引起许多讨论，涉及解释语言行为需假设的心理机制，特别涉及句子形成的不同过程，如右分叉和左分叉构式的形成。