Talk:Garden path sentence

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The horse raced past the barn fell. It might appear at first glance that this is not a grammatical sentence.

And no matter how many times I read it, it is still not grammatical.

• The horse that raced past the barn fell (yes)
• The horse which raced past the barn fell (yes)
• The horse raced past the barn fell (not grammatical)

I think it is a terrible example, because it really isn't grammatical. Kingturtle 10:58, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It is grammatical, the problem is that "raced" is the same form in the active past as it is in the passive. It's like saying "the car driven past the barn" (where the car is obviously being driven by someone) vs. "the car drove..." (well...the car is probably still being driven, but it's presented in an active voice). Still, no one would ever use "raced" like that on purpose, except to confuse people for this example :) Adam Bishop 22:21, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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Is it clearer after the improved rewriting from Dysprosia and Sdw25?

• The sandwhich eaten by Fred was tasty.

Is the above sentence grammatical?

In Sturt and Crocker 95 (?), there's also a nice example:

• While Philip was washing the dishes crashed on the floor

meaning that While Philip was washing (himself?), the dishes crashed on the floor.

I think the Philip sentence is a bit of a cheat. Strictly speaking, there should be a comma after "washing".

Sdw25 22:56, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Well, ok, that's a reasonable point. And we can't turn to speech either because people would likely pause a bit: While Philip was washing... the dishes crashed on the floor Kowey 08:54, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The Philip sentence is a lot of a cheat. Omitted punctuation is omitted punctuation (and OWL agrees that it is missing punctuation). I've removed that example. — mendel ☎ 13:39, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

The same paper also points out that the sentence

• Everybody knows the truth hurts

does not pose any problems, when you'd think people would do (Everybody knows the truth) (hurts?!)

I like these examples better, but i suspect the horse sentence is more famous. Hmm... maybe we should start a List of linguistic example sentences.

Kowey 18:15, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Contents 1 i can see and hear it now 2 Shoot the attendant 3 Commas 4 Fishie fishie fishie fish 5 Another parsing 6 Constructed Languages

[edit] i can see and hear it now

It took a while before I understood the horse-sentence. It wasn't until I read the example "The logs floated down the river sank" at [1] that the horse-sentence finally clicked in my head.

I feel that the description in the article of the horse-sentence is much better. And I hope that others will *GET* it faster than I did. Kingturtle 18:51, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

P.S. As a high school teacher, I have to unravel such sentences often. Students are still developing their writing skills, and they write some outrageous garden path sentences. It hurts my brain sometimes trying to unravel the sentences. Kingturtle

Thanks for the link! This will be useful for school. And also thanks for the P.S; I always figured garden path sentences were generally artifical since people would detect that they were writing something nonsensical. Very interesting to see in it the real world. Kowey 18:59, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The next time I run across student garden path sentences, I will post them in here. Kingturtle 19:05, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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Several things:

1. "The dog I had loved bones.": I don't think this is a good example; I think most people will naturally read this as (The dog I had) (loved bones). (The dog I had loved) isn't very natural sounding, so the chances of being led down that garden path doesn't seem great.
2. "The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR.": d'oh, can someone please explain how this is grammatical? I can't figure it out.
3. Not sure what point you're trying to make about natural language parsing. How is garden path a challenge? Because you want a computer to get garden path right, or because you want the computer to get garden path wrong the same way a human does? A neuroscientist would say, "this is great: we can make the computer do it wrong the same way a person does by requiring the computer to parse iteratively, ergo humans probably parse iteratively.". That's not a problem, it's an opportunity.

--Chinasaur 04:55, Mar 26, 2004 (UTC)

1. I think you're right. Although the correct meanings of all of these are getting awfully familiar to me...
2. "The tycoon (who was) sold...oil tracts...wanted to kill JR."
3. I was wondering the same thing.

Quincy 08:10, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Couldn't it mean "The tycoon sold the tracts for a lot of money, (he) wanted for facilitating the killing of J.R."? 惑乱 分からん 16:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Clever, but a missing comma is a missing comma.icambron 19:02, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

You're right. we want the computer to get it wrong the same way we do, but that's not as easy as it might look. I've made a somewhat clumsy attempt at patching some holes in number 3. The language is a little rough, but maybe this is an improvement? -- Kowey 17:48, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Could somebody please explain the last sentence? "The player kicked the ball kicked the ball" doesn't sound right to me. --AlexMyltsev 17:59, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oh geez ... "The player kicked the ball kicked the ball." I know that's grammatically correct, but oof, is it difficult to parse ... Gelu Ignisque

If it helps: "The player (who was) kicked the ball (...) kicked the ball". Maybe we should make a table with intitial reading and correct reading". -- Kowey 19:55, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As much as I try, I can't seem to parse that properly. What goes between the words "ball" and "kicked?" Even if I cheat by adding punctuation marks, I can't make sense of it. I even tried Googling the sentence, but the only result was the entry itself. Does anyone have a better interpretation of this? I think such an explanation would benefit the people reading as well, anyway. -- Cma 21:55, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

That's really interesting. In between "ball" and "kicked" is a verbal pause. A long comma, dot dot dot. Let's try this another way. THE PLAYER kicked the ball KICKED THE BALL. The uppercase bit is the main part of your sentence: The player kicked the ball. The lowercase bit tells you which player: The one to whom the ball was kicked. -- Kowey 07:49, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Ahhhhh, The player to whom the ball was kicked kicked the ball. Eureka!--Smallwhitelight 00:13, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If I'd known the writer, I'd have kicked his balls... 惑乱 分からん 16:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Shoot the attendant

If you wish to shoot the attendant will be happy to load your gun. Sorry, but it's cheating--this sentence only makes sense with a comma, and if there were a comma, there would be no ambiguity. I've removed it. --Migs 06:12, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Why does the comma matter when these are spoken?

Commas (and other punctuation) are crude ways of signalling pauses, intonation contours, and other phonological features we use in speech to mark constituents (among other things). Of course they take on a kind of life of their own as written language becomes a constant and important activity and people make rules about it. People have made rules about where commas must or mustn't be used in written English, and other people respect them or don't to differing degrees.

I can pronounce a sentence like the If you wish to shoot one with very little pause or intonation dip between the words shoot and the, and might well do so (if I thought about it in time) on purpose because it is funny. So this is for me a perfectly legitimate garden path sentence. Of course, I can also say it with a pronounced (in both senses of the word) pause and complex intonation dip-and-rise in the same place, and would certainly transcribe that pronunciation, which would not exemplify the garden-path phenomenon, with a comma. If we take this as an example of spoken English(,) we needn't include the comma and should be able to include the sentence. I'm for putting it back--it's a good one. Same can be said of several others discussed above.

--Lavintzin 15:26, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I've no recollection of being taught that the commma between an "if" clause and the clause it modifies is compulsory. Moreover, one of my books gives a use of the comma as to "avoid collisions", and this as an example. Nothing about the comma in this instance being to make the sentence grammatical. Maybe there are dialectal differences.... -- Smjg 11:10, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/writing/comma?10 Here's a source for the comma requirement. More can be found by Googling comma "if clause". By the way, how are dialectal differences resolved on articles where they might make a significant difference, anyway? --Migs 02:12, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

I removed the latest example given--While Anna dressed the baby spit up his food. This is also cheating, since a prepositional phrase should be followed by a comma when used as the introductory part of a sentence.

[edit] Commas

Most people would write all of these sentences with commas. The point of garden path sentences is that people says them in conversation without pauses because they don't realise that they are confusing until they have finished saying them (or possibly never because it makes sense in their heads). I don't think you can say that any sentence is 'cheating' becuase it hasn't got a comma without saying they are all cheating Ted BJ 10:30, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, not quite all of them would normally be written with (or disambiguable by) commas. E.g. I would have a hard time putting a comma in "Fruit flies like a banana", for instance.

But in the cases where the comma could or perhaps should be written, I agree with you: if the comma (pausal intonation) needn't be pronounced, these sentences are good examples when understood to represent speech, regardless of whether they follow somebody's rules for correct writing.

--Lavintzin 22:26, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I would write it as 'fruit-flies like a banana.'

-- 17 September 2006

OK, that could be. (I did a quick google on "fruit-flies", which I suppose would include cases with a hyphen. On the first 5 pages of results I only saw cases of "fruit flies" —no hyphen. fwiw.) And conceivably this possible orthographical distinction might be reflected in somebody's speech by a pronunciation difference that would in some degree disambiguate the meanings, maybe a quicker transition between fruit and flies. I'd still maintain that (1) the pronunciation difference is not required, and (2) it is perfectly possible to pronounce the sentence so as to provide no bar to either parse up till the word "banana". And even then it is semantic incompatibility (i.e. the fact that the sentence makes no sense), not intonation or pauses, that clues you in that the modifier-plural.noun parse must be the right one.

--Lavintzin 04:04, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fishie fishie fishie fish

How about "Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish"? It sounds like gibberish of course, but so long as you remember that 'fish' can be noun or verb, singular or plural, mentally sprinkle in words like 'that'and and throw in the occasional passive construction, you can come up with all sorts of possible meanings. Consider two:

Fish fish for fish that fish - which are fished by fish - fish for.

Fish that other fish fish for in turn fish for fish that other fish fish for.

This does not mean of course that you can make it mean anything you want involving fish (and nothing but). Unless you start out with the right sorts of templates the sentence is meaningless, and you need to constantly backtrack to understand what might be going on.

--Gargletheape 16:47, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Another parsing

"The horse raced past. The barn fell."

Equally valid? DS 12:19, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

No. I (at least) can't achieve a single pronunciation that allows both parses. So for me this is like the old ones "What's in the road? A head?" or "What's dragging, a long behind?" Yes, the same words in the same sequence can be used, but the intonation and pausings must be changed to get the different parse. That's different from these garden path sentences. Some of them *can* be pronounced so as to distinguish the two competing parses (see discussion above about commas), but they can also be pronounced so as to be ambiguous. Your parse *must* be pronounced so as to distinguish.

--Lavintzin 14:24, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Constructed Languages

Aren't there some conlangs without Garden Path sentences? That is to say, specifically constructed such that all of the relationships within a sentence are unambiguous? I think Lojban or Loglan. Somebody mention this is the article if it matters.