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Garden path sentence

en.wikipedia.org

124 pointsniyazpk42 comments

A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian, that many garden path sentences achieve their ambiguity via hanging prepositions, e.g.:

>The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

Yet the most general pattern seems to be a simple matter of loading too many words into the subject clause [1], e.g.:

>The car driven past the barn crashed.

We don't reach the verb until the last word, which not only opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose. You will produce tighter, sharper sentences by front-loading the predicate verb.

[1] - edited from "too many clauses" as per telemachos's astute reply.

A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation.

Killjoy.

"..opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose."

You wouldn't make friends in Germany :)

or as Twain said:

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

I have encouraged many of my friends to learn German just so they can understand the comedic brilliance of "The Awful German Language".

For those who have studied German but haven't read Twain yet: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language

Or in Japan!

English is a Germanic language. (Yes, there's other stuff mixed in, but the root is Germanic.) There is a natural tendency for the main verb to go in second position. However, second position does not necessarily mean second (full stop) because of phrase groupings. Your own sentences give good examples. I've put parens to group things and second position is in italics:

> (A judicious use of commas) helps ...

> (the most general pattern) seems...

(I think that the initial adverbial 'Yet' doesn't count for purposes of verb position, but I may be wrong about that. It's been a bit for me...)

The thing is that the sentence you quote as a bad example (and it is bad, and should be edited) feels natural, because it follows that rule:

> (The car driven past the barn) crashed.

There aren't multiple clauses at the front. There is a single (overpacked) noun phrase.

I'm not excusing bad writing, but the patterns that underlie your own language can trip you up in surprising ways.

You're absolutely right, of course. By "front-load" I don't mean literally the second word; rather, I mean moving the predicate verb as close to the front of the sentence as clarity and flow allow.

Was the "get-off-my-lawn" pun intentional?

Related, also very funny, a list of sentences used as examples to show various weird language constructs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent....

My favorite:

"In a similar vein, Martin Gardner offered the example: Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"

Some quick examples:

Garden path: "The horse raced past the barn fell."

The whole meaning is changed by adding one word to the end of the sentence, and you have to read the whole thing again to get it right. Makes hell for software trying to parse the sentence.

Paraprosdokian: "It's too bad that whole families have to be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs."

The whole meaning is changed (and made funny!) by an unexpected series of words at the end. I love the examples on the wikipedia page.

And don't forget the double-Paraprosdokian! One example which springs to mind:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=726#co...

(Remember to mouse over the red button.)

This is basically the entire concept of smbc.

The process involved here seems to be a backtracking search: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Backtracking

What's interesting is that by looking at how many nested levels are still understandable, we can also make a guess about the stack size of our brain. (short term memory (?))

Or at least some specialized subcomponent.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

Oysters oysters oysters split split split.

You've made it to result 1a on Google. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Oysters+oysters+...

In fact, at present four of the 10 front-page Google results for that query were written by me. (Two copies of the one in this thread, plus two copies of something on the C2 wiki. I can't be 100% sure that I wrote the latter, but I'm pretty sure it was me.)

I love it because the sentence itself resembles an oyster.

Note that you can also construct arbitrary-length buffalo sentences without using the proper noun.

I wonder about the same phenomenon but on higher levels of organization, e.g. concepts in an explanation. Are there valid ways to explain some concept C such that the interpreter is led down a garden path.

More important would be the existence of exclusively garden path concepts, call it the set EGPC. EGPC is the set of concepts which can only be arrived at via explanations or chains of concepts and reasoning that include at least one misleading garden path. One goal of clear teaching would seem to be reducing the number of conceptual garden paths that students encounter; so knowing that some subject necessitates them would be useful.

I'm noticing this while reading Under the Dome. There are many sentences where I just stop at the last couple words because the sentence doesn't make sense at that point. Quite a few times I thought they were typos. When I analyze the sentence though I find that I needed to pause in another spot or use a different meaning of a word. Haven't run into this often in other books.

I didn't run into it much through the next 800 pages of the dome. I'm almost half way through Catch-22 and it is essentially built on this type of sentence.

Weird, as a non-native and non-fluent english speaker, I don't suffer that effect.

Really? How does that work?

Do you read the entire sentence, before trying to parse the grammar?

For example, when reading "The man returned to his house was happy", you don't provisionally interpret "The man returned to his house" as meaningful?

I suppose that i read the entire sentence before parsing it, just because i need a slight rational effort to decode it.

Interesting.

I'm a native English speaker, living in a foreign country, so I spend most of my day working with a language I'm not completely fluent in, and I find I do the opposite-- I'm trying to put the meaning together word by word as the sentence unfolds, which makes reading things with long, Proustian sentences very difficult.

I've just had a similar conversation with my Japanese wife, and she pointed out that with many of the words that can be interpreted as nouns or verbs by fluent speakers, she only knows one interpretation, so she misses the 'garden' path that a fluent speaker would take. I suspect that it also applies to transitive vs. intransitive verbs.

So to contrive your example, a fluent speaker would know both the transitive and intransitive uses of "returned" and, preferring the intransitive interpretation ("I returned home"), would reach your conclusion. But if a non-fluent speaker only knew -- or was stronger with -- the transitive version ("I returned the book"), they would arrive at the correct interpretation.

I hope that makes sense, it was a lot harder to explain than I anticipated!

I did a presentation a few years ago on some studies about using prosody to resolve sentence ambiguities. The improvement in listener comprehension was measurable and dramatic. The easy conclusion to draw is that leveraging prosody in your day-to-day speech makes you better understood because the listener doesn't have to devote as much conscious attention to figuring out what you're trying to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)

I learned about these in a linguistics course in college. My favorite from back then was, "The building blocks the sun faded toppled."

Depending on how you are led down it, you might have two abrupt and unanticipated words at the end.

I remember encountering several of these at the start of Van Vogt's sci-fi classic World of Null-A. I couldn't figure out if it was deliberate in any way, or just an annoying accident.

I don't remember particular sentences like that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were at least partially intentional. Ambiguity is one of the main components of hypnotic inductions, and van Vogt was a lay expert on hypnosis. (He co-authored "The Hypnotism Handbook" with Charles Cooke, for example.)

It's said that van Vogt would sometimes rely on unconscious processing and "dream logic" (for want of a better term) in his writing processes, so those sentences you noticed might well have been both "accidental" and unconsciously intentional.

> the garden path effect is created by a (grammatically allowed) lack of punctuation

Take THAT, grammar nazis!

It won't be fun when talking about garden path sentence without bringing up the epitome of them all, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo....

Great as that is, it's not really a garden path sentence, as there's no element of being misled. It looks absurd from the outset.

Yes it is. Read it again.

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My dad used to say "Throw the cow over the fence, some hay"

Which stove did Rolf saute the broccoli with the sesame seed oil next to?

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