Talk:Cross-serial dependencies

Could use some Dutch exemples

Since Dutch is one of the few (the only?) other language having cross-serial dependencies, would be nice to have some Dutch examples as well. For example, the first sentence in Dutch would be "(dat) wij Hans het huis helpen schilderen". It even goes with three parts: "(dat) Jan Piet de kinderen zag helpen zwemmen" ("(that) Jan saw Piet help the children swim") Jalwikip (talk) 14:42, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Just edited the page to contain the Dutch examples from Bresnan et al. (1982)[PDF for instance found here]:

• ...dat Jan de kinderen zag zwemmen(...that Jan saw the children swim)
• ...at Jan Piet de kinderen zag helpen zwemmen (...that Jan saw Piet help the children swim)
• ...dat Jan Piet Marie de kinderen zag helpen laten zwemmen (...hat Jan saw Piet help Marie make the children swim)

I'd like to have some visuals for this too, but for now I hope a first version without visuals suffices. Bresnan et al. do have some crossing lines drawn in their gloss, if you'd like to get an idea already. However, a consistent visual presentation with the Swiss-German example would be desirable.

Disclaimer: I don't speak Dutch, so I cannot come up with a Dutch equivalent of the Swiss-German sentence and went with citing the example in Bresnan et al. (which might or might not come from them originally? Couldn't find the paper of Huybregts (1976) they reference, unclear to me whether the reference is also for the examples) as this paper was already cited. PlusMinuscule (talk) 14:06, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Someone on Twitter is saying the Swiss German example is incorrect

https://x.com/AmmannNora/status/1908540899925045405

I don't know how to validate if this is true or not as I don't speak Swiss German! But plausibly needs fixing - Mvolz (talk) 08:24, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm also not a native speaker of Swiss-German but would like to add my 2 cents:

• This has also been discussed on the discussion page of the user who uploaded the file to Wikimedia (see here). While the Twitter(X) comment reads "swiss german is my mother tongue. I dont think this is a valid (nor used!) sentence structure", someone commented on the aforementioned discussion page that they were a native speaker of Swiss German and remarked that it "is completely fine, although not commonly used."
• Shieber (1985) himself devoted a section in his paper to potential counterarguments, one of them being section 4.1 "The Data Are Wrong" (p.337) that you might be interested in reading. He outlines how the grammaticality judgments were elicited and by whom, and then everyone can decide on their own whether they find it convincing enough :)

But to make this clear, since Wikipedia is all about citing sources (WP:CITE) I'm completely d'accord with the removal of a picture/statement with unclear status. PlusMinuscule (talk) 17:38, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I've removed the disputed image, as there was no source for it (unlike the other sentence), but here it is: