I had a Brazilian roommate who could second this. He (jokingly) complained this was the absolute worst when dealing with split-proposition-verbs:
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.
Well, English too has some interesting ideas where to put prepositions in the sentence, that is, turn them basically into postpositions. For example, "Which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine in?"
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".
"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
Shorten even further to "Exquisite marble figure; which basket?" or "which basket? Exquisite marble figure." Depending on which is more likely to short circuit based on context.
I have in mind an idea for a movie scenario where someone important is on their death bed and says their last words, and nobody can tell what they actually meant because it may be missing the second part of the verb, resulting in a potentially completely different meaning :)
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.