This excursus presents and discusses a very complex sentence, which is actually a word chain whose status as a grammatical sentence may be questioned. The interested reader may nevertheless find it relevant to glance at the processes, because of the prominent role sentences of this type played in the history of language science. The present circuit proves that a string with center embeddings can be processed by neuronal grammar. There is nothing in the neuronal algorithm that would restrict the number of embeddings possible. Clearly, however, such restrictions apply for biological systems.

Consider sentence (1).

1. (1) Betty who John who Peter helps loves gets up.

Figure E5.1 presents the network representations of the elements of this sentence, word webs and sequence sets, and their mutual connections, whereas Table E5.1 shows the derivation. It becomes obvious from the table that this derivation draws heavily on multiple activation of sequence sets. As in Excursus E4, the table lists multiple activity states of each neuronal set at each time step, with the highest activity state listed at the top. Note that, according to the present proposal, each neuronal set can be considered a store in which multiple entries can be placed on each other. A similar proposal was made by Schnelle (1996b). The little “stacks” of symbols represent the entries in the pushdown memory characterizing each set. The maximum “height” of a stack is three levels.