Garden path sentences

[pne]

"Fat people eat accumulates" and other garden path sentences

Comments

[clarelass.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I often speak like this, leading to odd glances. Now I know what to call it!

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Nice, we talked about this just last week in my psycholinguistics course :)

English is just offering so many opportunities for those sentences.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

This is great! Both "Fat people eat accumulates" and "The player kicked the ball kicked the ball" threw me for a moment, but the rest all sort of jumped out at me.

I think that "While Philip was washing dishes crashed to the floor" is simply missing a comma, though. (As does someone else in the discussion. In that case...)

[pne.livejournal.com]

I can't parse "The player kicked the ball kicked the ball"... oh, hang on.

Does it mean "The player to whom someone kicked the ball, in turn, kicked the ball himself"? I guess I didn't get it because it was an indirect object rather than a direct object.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Right -- like "The player thrown the ball threw the ball", but with feet.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I second, third, or whatever this. I also feel that:
"I convinced her children are noisy."

is simply ungrammatical unless I am missing a possible interpretation. However:

I convinced her, children are noisy.

Is fine, but also not a garden path sentence. I like most of the examples, but I think using bad grammar as a claim to gardenpathness is just cheating.

[pthalo]

Weird, in Second Language Acquisition we used garden path in a different way. For us, it meant that the teacher leads students to make an L1 transfer error which then shows them that the mistake is natural and normal and then after they make the mistake they're instructed on the correct form and this helps them to remember it. For example, native speakers of English are learning French and they are asked to translate the following sentences.

I know when JFK was the president.
I know the day he died.
I know the name of his wife.
I know Jacquline Kennedy Onassis.

So they translate them into French and they end up using the same verb for the last one as they did for the previous three because in English there's only one verb "to know" but in French (and in Hungarian) you use a different verb for the last one. So they're led down the garden path to make a transfer error and then they all see why the transfer error was made and then learn the correct form and this helps them to remember to use the different verb with the last example later on.

[allegrox.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting except that almost all of them are grammatically incorrect. I only see a few that I would consider real and correct garden path sentences. The rest are just missing commas and/or relative pronouns.

On another note, however, it may be interesting to figure out how this concept might work in other languages in which words are not used so freely. It could become difficult if, for example, your nouns are marked for case (even more so if entire clauses are marked, as per Japanese)

Japanese, with its (typcially) Subject-Object-Verb word order and its modifiers in front, probably makes this all but impossible. If you parse a string of words as a complete sentence and then come upon a noun, then you just assume that the sentence modifies the noun (the noun is the subject, usually). In this case (and probably others) the syntax makes the statement clear without requiring the reader to back-track, unless perhaps something unusual follows that contradicts said assumption.

[pne.livejournal.com]

The rest are just missing commas and/or relative pronouns.

That's debatable. In my 'lect, "The man I saw yesterday" and "The man whom I saw yesterday" are both correct; the first version is not "missing" a relative pronoun.

This sometimes causes problems for English speakers learning another language, such as German, where such relative pronouns are not optional. But I'd say that in English, they usually are: they can be included or left out at the desire of the speaker.

I suppose one big reason this works in English is very little use of inflection (so, for example, imperfects and passive participles can look the same, and nouns and verbs can be identical [which is what gives "Time flies like a banana" three interpretations, with any of the first three words able to be the main verb]). Though the fact that you can leave out small words such as relative pronouns and auxiliary verbs (e.g. in the passive) also helps.

[allegrox.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this is a dialectal difference, or just a different standard (English teachers can never agree on just one). For example, I would typically set off the relative clause with commas in your second example, but doing so in the first would make it look like an inverted sentence.

In my usage, clauses with "when", "which", etc. (basically any relative pronoun than looks interrogative) are set off with commas if they modify the word just before them, but have no commas if they modify a word occurring earlier in the sentence. Those with "then" do just the opposite. This creates the ability to reduce comma usage by switching words. Of course, this isn't really the local dialect (of the Midwestern US) since I learned it more recently. I also tend to include the relative pronouns whenever leaving them out could cause confusion, but I guess the local dialect doesn't require them (does any?).

The confusion is usually avoided in speech by separating the relative clause with grammatical pauses, equivalent to written commas. Most people I know just don't realize they're necessary. But this also may be dialectal or nonstandard.

[pne.livejournal.com]

For example, I would typically set off the relative clause with commas in your second example, but doing so in the first would make it look like an inverted sentence.

For me, "The man, whom I saw yesterday" is grammatical but distinct from "The man whom I saw yesterday" (it's a matter of restrictive vs non-restrictive clauses; in the first case, the "whom I saw" is incidental while in the second, it's required to distinguish the man I'm talking about). German would use a comma in both cases, so you'd need extralinguistic cues such as intonation to distinguish.

I also make the distinction in speech, pausing longer before "whom" when I'd write a comma and more briefly or not at all when I wouldn't.

Do you not make a distinction between "The students who are smart will succeed in their exams" [There are many students. Some are smart. The smart ones will succeed.] and "The students, who are smart, will succeed in their exams" [There are many students. They will (all) succeed in their exams. By the way, those students are smart.] ?