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)

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

[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)

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)


"The editors authors the newspaper liked hired quit." I can't get this one, I've been trying for a couple of hours now. Is it really correct? As someone pointed out above, could be a point in adding an explanation for all examples brought up. 89.253.79.216 (talk) 22:14, 17 December 2007 (UTC)Oskar

Here is my understanding of the meaning: The newspaper liked some authors; those authors hired some editors; those editors quit. So, to me, the sentence parses as "The editors (hired by authors whom the newspaper liked) quit." -Phoenixrod (talk) 00:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
But doesn't "The editors authors" signify some kind of ownership of the authors by the editors, i.e. the authors were hired by the editors? And if so I can't get the sentence to be correct. 91.194.26.1 (talk) 10:20, 18 December 2007 (UTC)Oskar
I read it the other way around, as some kind of ownership of the editors by the authors, as in "The editors (who were hired by authors the newspaper liked) quit." I could see your reading if there were an apostrophe. But I have no problem removing the example if it's not in the league of the others. -Phoenixrod (talk) 03:54, 19 December 2007 (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)
Nope, fruit fly is right and fruit-fly is wrong. You use hyphens to clarify compound nouns used as modifiers -- see this icambron 08:57, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, the #1 example ought to be "The horse, raced past the barn, fell." or even.. using parentheses. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.21.221 (talk) 05:14, 1 October 2007 (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)
Perhaps you want Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. -- kowey 20:20, 2 January 2007 (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)
I think a distinction can be drawn here between garden path oral and garden path written sentences. Yes, orally, the above sentence ("The horse raced past. The barn fell.") would not be confused with the example in the article. In text (without punctuation) it would be. It seems to me to be a legitimate solution to the puzzle implicitly posed by the original example ("The horse raced past the barn fell.")It would still be a garden path sentence, because the reader would, on first reading the sentence, take "the barn" as the object of the preposition "past", when it could be the subject of the verb "fell". Boxter1977 (talk) 11:38, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Orally (with intonation) the sentences "The horse raced past. The barn fell." would not be confused with the example in the article. In text (with punctuation) they wouldn't be either. Intonation is essentially the oral equivalent of punctuation here, you can't really compare one with and the other without. With the fullstop in the middle (whether written or inferred by pronunciation) it is not a garden path sentence, without it, it is. Though I am sure there are sentences which are only garden path sentences when spoken (because of homophones) this is not one of them. Angelastic (talk) 16:00, 22 May 2008 (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.

[edit] The cotton clothing is usually made of

I removed this example because it (and its explanation) are worded in an awkward manner that involves ending a clause in a preposition. It should be The cotton of (or from) which clothing is usually made, which I think we can agree would not be called a garden path sentence, since the meaning would in that case be perfectly clear. There. Can it be removed again now? elvenscout742 00:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Not by my lights. The "awkward" wording is perfectly natural to me.
Ending clauses (including relative clauses) with "stranded" prepositions is older than Shakespeare and is a very well-established feature of many modern Englishes, including my native language. I certainly agree that if you use the "of which clothing is usually made" wording you will not have a garden path sentence. So that version should of course not be used as an example in the article. My own dialect permits that way of wording it, but marks it as highly formal and fairly unusual; for millions of English speakers it is pedantic or "uppity" at best and ridiculous in any case. These people will always (as I will almost always) say "Who am I talking to?" rather than "To whom am I talking?" (I understand that it was Churchill who said of the practice of preposition-stranding, "That is something up with which I will not put.")
For those whose English language admits the stranded preposition construction, this is a perfectly good example of a garden path sentence, and I see no reason, based on the preference of some to avoid the stranding of prepositions, for omitting it. It would be like removing "ain't" from a list of English words with an initial [eʲn] sound because one prefers not to use the word oneself, or removing "legs" from a list of body parts because one prefers to refer to the "lower limbs". (Yes, the "of which" construction sounds that prissy to a lot of native English speakers.)
Your argument is, essentially, "This sentence can be rephrased, in a manner to which I am partial, so as to keep it from being a garden path sentence". In fact all the garden path sentences can be rephrased so as to be immediately clear. That does not justify removing them from the list of garden path sentences. The point of these sentences is that, although they initially lead you to expect to find a clear meaning in one way, they actually reward you with a clear meaning after you do a double-take and head down a different semantico-syntactic path. (This contradicts, I think, your implication that garden path sentences are not "perfectly clear".) The point is not that the same message couldn't be expressed in some other way that would avoid that effect.
--Lavintzin 01:41, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Eh, I suppose I'll let it go, but I think that Churchill thing might be apocryphal - there are circumstances where it is unavoidable, but the fact that a lot of people have done it for a long time does not make it correct, any more than using "effect" as a verb is correct. Also, I see little need for the list at all, and the one being debated isn't even the most inappropriate, as I now realise. Try saying "I convinced her children are noisy" - its meaning is obvious and it could not be interpretted any other way. elvenscout742 01:34, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I can say the "convinced her children" one just fine. It is a fairly short garden path, but for me a real one. It is true of all of them, by the time you get to the end, that "it could not be interpretted [sic!] any other way." If you mean using "effect" when people mean "affect", I agree, but it is a perfectly good verb. Churchill, again: "Important change of an ancient custom can only be effected by Act of Parliament". No Act of Parliament has yet changed the ancient custom of stranding prepositions, and it would probably be powerless to do so in any case.
My favorite stranded-preposition sentence is the following, uttered by a child sick in bed upstairs, whose mother has brought things from the library to read to him: "What did you bring all those books that I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"
Hmmm "For what did you bring up all of those books from which I would have preferred that you not read to me?"
--Lavintzin 01:55, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Yet another example?

Would Throw the baby down the stairs a cookie. be a valid example? 165.95.11.23 23:59, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I guess the meaning is intended to be "the baby who is down the stairs". I would have to word that as "throw the baby downstairs a cookie". That is a garden path sentence, albeit one with a short path. (It could be made longer: "throw the baby out in the garden a cookie.") If this is a Pennsylvania Dutch-ish sentence meaning "Throw a cookie down the stairs to the baby", then it isn't a (proper) garden-path sentence because it has non-standard syntax. I.e. it does lead you down a garden path, but there doesn't turn out to be a standard-syntax parsing that gives the intended meaning. --Lavintzin 02:47, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Star Spangled Banner

A while ago, I added an example from the Star Spangled Banner. It was removed because it was misquoted (I forgot a comma), "removed from context", and "controversial".

The sentence is:

  • "Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?"

It is easy to correct the missing comma. The context doesn't help, because a reader still thinks that the flag (rather than the ramparts) is the thing being watched until the final clause. Even if it were controversial (it is not), that is no reason not to add it -- instead, it is a reason to make note of opposing viewpoints.

So, I'm going to leave this note here for a while, and if I don't hear anything that convinces me otherwise, I'm going to return it. Novalis 20:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

... I did. Novalis 23:57, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bummer! Sexism and gendered language, invisible?

Ouch! I must admit surprise at seeing the following entry: "The old Vaudevillian joke often quoted by E. E. Cummings, "Would you hit a woman with a baby? No I'd hit her with a brick," uses the same effect."

I was taken aback by the author's comment following the quote ("uses the same effect") as I was expecting some sort of explanation for using degrading sexist material in place of innumerable harmless examples. Yet, I was more surprised, even shocked, that a conversation about the article is taking place with no previous mention of the unacceptable nature of hitting "a woman with a baby" and, then, hitting "her with a brick"--pointing to a complete absence of consciousness concerning the continuation, rehabituation of casual insults directed at women.

If I had the confidence and the time I would seek to delete this offensive quote myself or spin the article in such a manner as to reflect the power of public language and why linguistic competence and responsibility must widen to also include content and context, symantics, as well as sounds and/or grammatical concentration on, letter/word/sentence, syntax. As long as the casual denegration of women remains unchallenged, the silent violence will remain invisible and, hence, unchanged--a path that leads us back not only to the Garden, the Serpent, tree, fruit, a forgiven Adam, and the now century's long torture of Eve. {{Thomhera 18:12, 1 August 2007 (UTC)}}

It's a joke. JOKE. You must be a smash at parties.Falard 02:39, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Past vs. passive participle (and deleted examples)

They aren't quite the same thing. "Gone" is a past participle, but not passive. "Raced" in "has raced" is also a past participle but not a passive one. Crucially in the sentence under discussion, "raced" is passive, meaning something close to "having been raced".

btw, somebody took out all the example sentences. I think that was a loss to the article. Yes, some that weren't such clear examples had been included in the list at various times, but taking all the examples out was not the best way to fix that problem, imho.

--Lavintzin 17:04, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs more meat

Many writers here have commented on the importance of punctuation. Yes, commas and hyphens are paramount in parsing these sentences correctly. However, once that is noted, we come to a deeper question: if most or all of these sentences can be elucidated by proper punctuation, what is their value. More commentary on the use of garden path sentences in psycholinguistics (and/or garden-linguistic sentences in psychopaths) is needed. --Cladist (talk) 08:17, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Their value lies in the facts that (1) most linguists recognize the written form of the language as distinctly secondary, and whether or not punctuation affects this in the written form doesn't obscure the main point, which is (2) that there are legitimate pronunciations of these sentences which do not have pauses or intonation dips (which might correspond to written punctuation) and which can therefore guide hearers down a garden path, making them suddenly pull up sharply (mentally) and start recalculating the meaning and syntax of the sentence. --Lavintzin (talk) 23:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Editors authors sentence

I deleted the following sentence, which is a nice sentence, but not, to my mind anyway, a good example of a garden-path sentence.

"The editors the authors the newspaper liked hired quit."
(The editors (that are hired by the authors that in turn are liked by the newspaper) quit)

What is the garden path one is started down, only to be brought up short? I suppose one could argue for it being a list or a compound nominal (e.g. "the editors, the authors, the newspaper and the public VerbPhrase") but I cannot pronounce the sentence with the pauses I would have to use with the compound nominal or the list. In any case, that's not the main interest of the sentence. It is a great sentence about (the limits of) multiple embedding of unmarked relative clauses, but, I still think, not a good garden-path sentence. --Lavintzin (talk) 23:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Syntactic ambiguity

I just restored a sentence "The man who whistles tunes pianos". It had been deleted as showing syntactic ambiguity rather than being a genuine garden path sentence. The premise is apparently that if it shows syntactic ambiguity it is not a garden path sentence. (I in fact am not sure why it is syntactic ambiguity if that implies it is non-lexical: it is clearly the word "tunes" that is the locus of the ambiguity.)

It produces, I believe, a genuine garden path, though a short (and not terribly noteworthy) one. When I hear “The man who whistles tunes" I expect a continuation like "usually has some secret on his mind" or "is a nuisance", but not "pianos", and when I hear "pianos" I have to go back and recompute to get the right parse. That is what makes a garden-path sentence.

One could remove all the sentences quoted in the article if one applied the criterion "Not legitimate if it shows syntactic ambiguity".

--Lavintzin (talk) 00:57, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Throwing cows

I removed the following sentence:

"Throw the cow over the fence some hay."
(Throw some hay over the fence for the cow.)

It is essentially a variant of Throw the baby down the stairs a cookie discussed above, and would raise the same red herrings. It is not standard syntax if the meaning is as given (it sounds Pennsylvania Dutch-ish, and may be standard in that dialect of English), and if it means "throw some hay to the cow that is over the fence" it is still odd. For me it would be better "for the cow on the other side of the fence". In any case, it raises too many extraneous questions to be a good sentence for the article. (Many others have been omitted already in the interest of tightening up the article.) --Lavintzin (talk) 22:23, 25 May 2008 (UTC)