Is "women men girls love meet die" a valid sentence?

Solution 1:

The particular sentence is a poor attempt at making an example of a sentence that is both grammatical but very difficult to process because of the multiple center embedding.

Spelled out the sentence is supposed to mean:

Women (that men (that girls love) meet) die"

or

"Some girls love some men. Those men met some women. Those women died".

To make it more understandable, just look at one embedding at a time ("Women men meet die." "Men girls love meet women.").

All these are legal (grammatical) transformations. But juggling all the references leads to the difficulty in processing by a person.

A more intuitive example (makes more intuitive sense once separated all out) is:

"The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped"

which expands more understandably to

"A dog bit a cat. That cat chased a rat. The rat escaped."

Presumably the sausage machine model allows easy processing of such center embedded sentences, so the inference is that the sausage machine is not the best model of processing that actual human brains do.

Solution 2:

There's a nursery rhyme that starts like this:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that chased the rat
That ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat
That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

and continues in a similar vein. We might imagine the following conversation.

A Oh, that was a nice cheese I sold to Jack the other day!

B Which cheese?

A The cheese the rat ate!

B Oh, OK. Hang on, which rat?

A The rat the cat chased, of course!

B Ah, so you're talking about the cheese the rat the cat chased ate, then?

A Um, what...?

B Well, you said it was the cheese the rat ate, right?

A Yes...

B The rat the cat chased?

A That's what I said.

B So it's the cheese pause the rat the cat chased pause ate!

A Haha, OK, I suppose so, but it doesn't sound right!

B Which cat is this, then?

A sigh...

The conversation continues in a similar way, until eventually...

B So you're talking about

the cheese
  the rat 
    the cat 
      the dog
        the cow tossed 
      worried
    chased
  ate

then?

A ???!!?

If we're going to use the full nursery rhyme, then the cheese in question is actually

The cheese the rat the cat the dog the cow the maiden the man the judge the cock the farmer owned woke married kissed milked tossed worried chased ate!

If that doesn't make sense to you, then don't worry - it shouldn't, if you're human! But it really is an interesting fact that this sentence doesn't appear to make sense. In contrast to what Mr Blow keeps saying, it really is not 'just that simple'. The strange thing is that while the individual parts

the cheese the rat ate
the rat the cat chased
the cat the dog worried
the dog the cow tossed

all make sense, we can't paste them together using logical rules and arrive at an understandable sentence. This is surprising: normally, we could replace the phrase the cheese in the sentence

The cheese was delicious.

with the cheese the rat ate to arrive at

The cheese the rat ate was delicious.

and we can make as many such substitutions as we like, so

The maiden bought the cheese from the judge.

becomes

The maiden the man kissed bought the cheese the rat ate from the judge the cock woke.

which, though clumsy, still makes perfect sense. It's only when we start to introduce defining clauses within defining clauses that our usual substitution rules stop giving us sentences which we can process.

It is a peculiar limitation of the human brain, not a formal rule of language, that means that the phrase

the cheese the rat ate

makes perfect sense, the phrase

the cheese the rat the cat chased ate

can be understood, but only with difficulty, and the longer phrases above look like complete gobbledegook.

Solution 3:

The sentence is clearly concocted to show the practical limits in the depth to which our natural ability to parse sentences applies recursively. (That one was not quite as bad.) Language allows sentences to be modified by adding some auxiliary phrases, or replacing some part by a more elaborate construct playing the same role in the context, and it would be hard to state a clear theoretical limit on how far one can go with this; however, obviously things become incomprehensible in practice at some point.

In the example the possibility to omit clarifying words and punctuation is abused to obtain a very short but hard to decipher result. Though of course not proper English, I think the following shows the structure of construction of this sentence most clearly.

Women (, [that] men (,[whom] girls love,) meet,) die.

If I had to restate the sentence for better transparency by just inserting some optional elements, I would state it as

Women, that men whom girls love meet, die.

Still not a beautiful sentence, but marginally comprehensible.