Garden path sentence
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked.
The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked.
The mouse feared the cat, who loathed the dog who barked.
Here's a toy Python parser I wrote many years ago actually listing out all valid parses of this sentence: https://github.com/taliesinb/chartreuse/blob/master/README.m...
The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable. The dog, who was loathed by the cat whom the mouse feared, barked.
Or even simpler:
The dog, who was loathed by the cat who was feared by the rat, barked.
Here's a helpful presentation summarizing some of this research: https://depts.washington.edu/lingconf/slides/Bader&Haeussler...
The sentence the comment the user replied to included parsed with difficulty.
There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.
A prescriptivist would say it follows allowed grammar rules but is still unintelligible.
A descriptivist would say it follows common usage patterns but takes it to such an extreme as to be unintelligible.
You see this pattern more often with proper names:
- That's the house Jack built.
- That's the woman the house Jack built fell on.
- That's the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired.
- That's the briefcase the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired carried.
At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to most native speakers?
It's also worth noting these sentences seem much stranger in writing than they do when heard. In writing, most sane people will use punctuation in the examples above. But in speaking, our tone of voice conveys enough context to use more streamlined structures.
Beyond 1 level of nesting. There's no rule allowing arbitrary nesting, nor do people commonly nest beyond 1 level.
I'm not sure where you saw hostility in my comment.
In fact, the "rule" that matters here is general sentence structure. It's fine to embed a single secondary clause inside a primary clause:
That's the woman [the house Jack built] fell on.
That's the lawyer [the woman <the house Jack built> fell on] hired.
Also, which example is 1 level of nesting? I think "That's the woman the house Jack built fell on." is 2 levels nesting, and I frequently hear constructs like that – in speaking. I agree it's rarer in writing though.
For example: What server is that? That's the server the consultant Jack brought in set up.
I'd never write that, because it's confusing. But I will naturally say things like that, without any problem in clarity, because you have more granular control over grouping and pausing, etc. If I said a sentence like that, you might hear it more as "That's the server the-consultant-Jack-brought-in set up."
Anyway, sorry if I misread your tone. It just came across very much as "I know what's right, and you're wrong." That might have been me projecting though. :)
There are examples of 2 levels of center-embedding which are clearly grammatical and not hard to understand:
> Anyone [who saw the woman [who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned.
Others are very hard to understand:
> Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned.
There are many factors that make a sentence hard to understand, not just degree of embedding. Some degree 2 sentences can be easy, and some degree 1 sentences can be hard (e.g. "the horse [raced past the barn] fell", which has only 1 level of embedding).
So if you want to describe English with the rule "no embedding beyond 1 level" then you're going to miss a lot of valid sentences while also failing to rule out lots of invalid ones.
Contrast this with a valid descriptive rule of English, such as "determiners such as 'the' always come before the nouns they modify". I can say "the man died", but "man the died" is never comprehensible under any circumstances and cannot be made better.
No one would say that a sentence with 10 levels of embedding is perfectly fine English. But descriptively, you have the problem that there is no non-arbitrary upper bound on embedding degree: it's not clear when one more level of embedding takes you from grammatical to ungrammatical, and furthermore it depends on the contents of the embedded clauses.
There is also some work I'm aware of, currently in prep for publication, showing that the extent to which people can understand multiply-embedded sentences strongly correlates with IQ (measured by Raven's matrices).
All this suggests that the simplest descriptive rule is to say that English allows center-embedding recursively, but that there are human processing limitations on sentences that create very deep stacks. The "human processing limitations" part is basically the whole field of psycholinguistics: many details have been worked out, but many details are still sketchy.
[1] Karlsson (2007): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
That being said, I still think the rule of 1 level still makes sense (not that all 1 level embeds are valid or easy, but that all embeds beyond 1 level are invalid).
> Anyone [who saw [the woman who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned.
That sentence has two complementisers, which the OP's sentence specifically did not. Introducing complementisers completely changes the rules and I think makes embedding much more possible.
Even with the brackets, I don't understand this one. Anyone killed by the man should be questioned?
(Also, shouldn't they both be 'whom'?)
And if they allow one sentence to be understood by members of the intended audience that knows the common rules and context and usage well, then that's as valid as it gets. Even if only very few can understand it, the fact that it is possible is enough.
A bit like HTML in browsers - there's the written rules and there's what browsers do anyway, and what's valid in real life is whatever gets the point across.
How so? Surely there is room for debate within descriptivism as to what constitutes evidence of something being used?
And no two prescriptivists can agree on which rulebook to use!
"The cat meowed"
to
"The cat the mouse feared meowed"
If your claim is that nesting to arbitrary depths is not allowed, what is the maximum depth that is "legal"?
If it's not parseable, then surely you can't.
Throw the cow over the fence some hay. What did you bring that book that I didn't want to be read to out of up for?> What did you take the car driving the man who brought the book that I didn't want to be read to out of up away in for?
Almost-untangled form:
> For what reason did you take in the car driven away by the man who brought up the book that I did not want anyone to read words out of [the book] to me?
Although if you are being very specific, I think some syntacticians might treat the "out" in "out of" and the "up" in "bring up" as a different word classes than normal prepositions (the "out" is modifying another preposition's direction, and the "up" is a particle in a phrasal verb [1]). And I think that's one of the reasons the original form is so compelling is that you have some variance in form giving you clues -- the directional modifier, the question-inversion/wh-fronting, the salience of "bring up" -- that make it tantalizingly close to natural. Whereas mine just becomes a churn of words, at least in my reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Examples_of_Phras... (see the notes on distinguishing between particle & prepositional phrasals)
Of course my naive approach suffered from lack of corpus; if it picked a rare word, it’d get railroaded into using the very limited set of words that follow that rare word and so on.
I remember running it - this was before the internet days, so I can’t imagine where I got the input text from - and getting back a page-full of gobbledygook. And there right in the middle, somehow drawing the eye like a magnet, was one of those railroaded sentences:
herbaceous
Well when your random roulette picks the word herbaceous, its likely only seen it once or so in its learning text, so there aren’t so many words it can pick next:
herbaceous border
So far so good. But where does this lead next?
herbaceous border disputes
Love it!
Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase:
http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...?
https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra...
http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99...
But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste?
I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.
Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!
The guy who had told the story before who had told the guy who had told the story before had forgotten had forgotten.
So sorry it offends you.
And I tried to make that last sentence a garden path one, to keep the comment on topic, but jeez it's hard to break the habit of avoiding them. I suspect it's deeply ingrained in me to an instinctual level by my 11th grade rhetoric teacher. (Her whole goal was to, and I quote, "make our insides scrunch when we saw a comma splice." Most who took her class would agree her curriculum was a resounding success, even after she also taught us to break the rules.)
herbaceous border disputes has become one of my favourite stories about markov chains. It's part of internet lore for me :)
> Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains
I haven't done any actual counting, but I'm like 80% sure Markov Chains have been mentioned more than 4 times on the internet.
Worth reading just for that little bit of precision.
The second sentence, in a paragraph of its own, would explain what just happened.
I doubt this would ever get past the serious folks at the 'pedia.
But if it did... That would be the difference between awesome and mundane.
Do native speakers concur?
Is there any research whether speakers do prefer utterances like my example in practice due to this property?
The horse raced past the barn fell
The horse, raced past the barn, fell
The old man the boat
As a native British English speaker I didn't actually have any trouble parsing any of the sentences save for the "The horse raced past the barn fell" because it was written without the customary punctuational scaffolding.
'The old man the boat' seemed fine to me too, not sure why.
I'd be interested to hear if other British English folks had much trouble with these sentences. Perhaps it's a by product of being exposed to too many 'dad jokes' (Fruit flies like a banana) but perhaps it's a more general condition of British English humour that made me feel familiar with this type of sentence structure.
The crooked defect home.
The hot lead the cold.
The quick pace themselves.
The wet tear off their wet clothes.
In my view it's as valid as something like:
The dog with the red nose died
The dog, with the red nose, died
But that changes the meaning. Consider a situation where you have two horses. One of them has been raced past the barn; the other never has. This matters because inside the barn there is an alien artefact emitting radiation that weakens the muscles. But that was yesterday. Today you have sent both horses out for another canter -- and one of them has suffered a fall. Tell me, Igor, which one was it? Did the radiation from the alien artefact cause the trouble? "The horse raced past the barn fell."
But the version with the commas is only applicable when (1) you already know which horse is being referred to and (2) the fall happens in racing past the barn or at least as an immediate consequence, it seems to me.
> > The horse raced past the barn fell
> should never be written like that.
Surely it can, and must, be so written if the thing past which the horse raced was, as Wikipedia mentions, "the fell by or at the barn"?
When spoken aloud, this is easier to understand. A fluent English speaker will be able to put the emphasis in the proper places.
* Intuinzinnen, From the Dutch proverbs "ergens intuinen" of "om de tuin geleid worden". Literally: To "be gardened into something", or "to be led around the garden." Both meaning the same as "lead someone down the garden path"
Seams the proverb is nearly similar in both languages. Which makes me wonder whether they originated from the same word. After all, Dutch and English (And German, Danish and Swedish) have the same common ancestor.
Or whether they describe the same, in the past generally known effect of garden paths leading to unexpected dead ends.
Garden is from French (jardin)
Back to the proverb: the dutch one seems to be about "keeping someone from that what is important/the truth" by not letting them in.
For example, 4+5×3 is a garden path, where reading left-to-right you may think to yourself, "four plus five is nine, then nine times... wait, I have to backtrack and handle five times three first..."
Whereas + 4 × 5 3 can't be confused. (Or 4 5 3 × + in RPN)
I'm not a (good) speaker of any other language than English, but I can see how adjective/verb/noun ordering in different languages can prevent this problem.
The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried.
Some of those verbs are binary operators (transitive), others are unary (intransitive).
The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried.
In step 1, the dog bit the boy.
In step 2, the boy hit the girl.
In step 3, the girl cried.
The details of the grammar of the languages makes the methods one can use to achieve the initially ambiguous parse different, though.