Garden path sentences

[pne]

"Fat people eat accumulates" and other garden path sentences

Comments

[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.] ?