Garden Path Sentences 2

[ESquared]

A garden path sentence is one that is grammatically correct, but due to peculiarities of the human brain and the complexities of syntactic processing (PDF) and disambiguation, tend to be parsed incorrectly. First I will give some examples, then will be the challenge: invent your own garden path sentences!

Here's the "classic" garden path sentence, at least, it seems to be the one that all the more technical articles referenced when I first learned about this a couple of years ago: (There are a lot more references on the web to the subject now than there used to be.)

The horse raced past the barn fell.

This sentence tends to be parsed incorrectly because we take the verb raced to be something the horse is doing. But in fact, in this sentence, raced is something being done to the horse. Perhaps you would parse it correctly if there were some disambiguating words:

The horse that was raced past the barn fell.

To make it even more explicit:

The horse--the one that George raced past the barn--fell.

Normally, these kinds of parsing errors are quickly sorted out. But in this case, because of the distance between the actual intransitive verb fell and the subject horse doing it, we get tripped up.

Here are some more:

The old man the boats.
Mary gave the child the dog bit a bandaid.
The landlord painted the walls with cracks. (PDF)
The prime number few.

Last, here's another interesting outline on the subject.

Invent your own garden path sentences! If you repeat any that are not your original inventions, link or otherwise reference them, and clearly mark which are your own and which are not.

 

[RodKnowlton]

I'd argue that there is no imprecision at all, E², only temporary ambiguity.

Let's take it a word at a time:

(the) - so ambiguous there's no point in considering it.

(the old) - meaningful ambiguity. "old" could be a noun or an adjective.

(the old man) - no change in ambiguity. There are both noun and verb meanings for "man", but disambiguating "old" would resolve which "man" is meant.

(the old man the) - still no change. "The" could be an article for an object, but it could also beginning of an adjective phrase.

(the old man the boat.) - There's our object! All ambiguity is removed, as the "noun verb" interpretation of "old man" is the only valid one.

There never was any imprecision, we just got lost for a little bit.

The problem is that the parsing process is overly eager and tries to guess ahead based on past experience. "the old man" is taken as a chunk, leaving "the boat" as the only other chunk. The parser then says "wait a minute, where's the verb?", and has to backtrack to see where it guess wrong.

In chip-ish terms, our parsing process uses predictive branching, which in this case is incorrect, leading to a pipeline stall.

 

[ESquared]

Like I said, an artifact of language.

But you've made a good point... there's no ambiguity at all in "the old man the boats." The question isn't about ambiguity in the sentence, but about disambiguating our parsing of the sentence.

But perhaps Dave was really trying to say: one should write sentences so that the garden-path effect is avoided, so that common parsing ambiguities don't even arise in the first place.

 

[ESquared]

And if Fell is a city on the river...

The old man the boats passed fell.
The old man the boats past Fell.

 

[RodKnowlton]

The railroad tracks all intersections.

The grocery stores folding boxes.

 

[ESquared]

Awesome! I really enjoy these.

 

[UniqueFD]

Does this qualify?

The old man the big boats past
the old man the big boats passed.