(2) (ii) the man who the boy who the students recognized pointed out is a friend of mine [...] The phrase 'A' is self embedded in 'B' if 'A' is nested in 'B' and, furthermore, 'A' is a phrase of the same type as "B". Thus "who the students recognized" is self-embeddeed in "who the boy who the students recognized pointed out", in (2ii), since both are relative clauses.
- Chomsky (1969), a pag.12