Garden path sentences

[pne]

"Fat people eat accumulates" and other garden path sentences

Comments

[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.