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Comment by skupig | Hacker News Reader

This is a great garden-path sentence. I had to read it like, 3 times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

curious because i can't find any alternative reading besides the question if the eggs that the girl found were the same eggs that the organizers had hidden.

Were the eggs found by the girl [that] the... oops, parse error, try again!

Agreed. Layer 8 error.

Don’t blame the hens!

While I agree that the sentence is not a garden path sentence, a garden path sentence doesn't need to have more than one reading. A garden path sentence is difficult to parse, but that doesn't mean it has more than one parsing available.

it doesn't need to have a correct second reading but it does need a partial misreading at least.

The partial sentence "Were the eggs [actually] found by the girl" means something else than "Were the eggs [that were] found by the girl the same [ones as]...". Even if the semantic meaning of the words is largely unchanged, the sentence structure parses quite differently. I can confirm that this also took me for a spin when reading the comment.

To be a garden path sentence at some point your parsing needs to do a substantial backtracking from the initially most likely reading. In this sentence, if you'd parsed the first seven words as "did the girl find the eggs?" you'd need to backtrack to the beginning on getting the eighth word (the).

It took me while to find the garden path, but the girl could have been hidden by the organizers.

Thank you SO MUCH for this. English isn’t my first language, and many times I’ve come across sentences like this. I’ve even been collecting them whenever I came across them, on Reddit mostly. I’ve always wanted to find out why this type of sentence only occurred in English (to my knowledge). I’ve always thought it was because a lot of words could be interpreted as either nouns, adjectives, verbs or even adverbs, while retaining the same spelling.

Anyway, I’m glad I finally found the term for these sentences. Many thanks.

the wikipedia page has examples in other languages too. i think the grammar and vocabulary has some influence over the ability to construct such sentences.

some sentences only work like that when written (like the german example) and others only when spoken.

being non-native speakers has the interesting advantage that often we don't know the default interpretation of a word, because we don't always know which meaning of a word is more common.

on the other hand we'll miss some because we are not even aware of the second meaning of some words.

Oops, sorry, rereading the sentence I tripped myself up!

So many participles at play here

???

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