
Garden path sentence - rgbrgb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
======
Xophmeister
A similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically)
infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and
"which"). So you get unparsable things like:

    
    
       The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked.
    

...punctuated and complementised makes it _slightly_ better:

    
    
       The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked.
    

...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics subtly but
significantly:

    
    
       The mouse feared the cat, who loathed the dog who barked.
    

I say "technically" because there's nothing stopping you from doing this, but
in reality, even one level of embedding can be borderline nonsensical (e.g.,
the "The horse raced past the barn fell" example).

~~~
Jabbles
You can't "technically" do that. Which "rule" (from which rulebook) do you
think allows you to arbitrarily repeat structures?

~~~
Xophmeister
There's no rulebook when it comes to syntax (grammar), unless you're a
prescriptivist. There is plenty of precedent for embedding subclauses (e.g.,
"Here is a sentence, that I just made up, which has an embedded subclause."),
but -- beyond anecdotal data -- there is no hard cut-off point to how many
times you are permitted to embed. Empirically, most people don't like more
than one level, but plenty of people allow it; thus it becomes more a function
of cerebral load than it does an argument of permitted structures.

~~~
morgante
If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a
prescriptivist approach.

There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it
grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed
by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common
usage and intelligibility.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
I disagree, and FWIW, I find your tone hostile.

A prescriptivist would say it follows allowed grammar rules but is still
unintelligible.

A descriptivist would say it follows common usage patterns but takes it to
such an extreme as to be unintelligible.

You see this pattern more often with proper names:

\- That's the house Jack built.

\- That's the woman the house Jack built fell on.

\- That's the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired.

\- That's the briefcase the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on
hired carried.

At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to
most native speakers?

It's also worth noting these sentences seem much stranger in writing than they
do when heard. In writing, most sane people will use punctuation in the
examples above. But in speaking, our tone of voice conveys enough context to
use more streamlined structures.

~~~
morgante
> At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to
> most native speakers?

Beyond 1 level of nesting. There's no rule allowing arbitrary nesting, nor do
people commonly nest beyond 1 level.

I'm not sure where you saw hostility in my comment.

~~~
canjobear
There's empirical work on this [1] (alas, paywalled): multiple center
embedding in speech is rare but exists. It is more common in writing.

There are examples of 2 levels of center-embedding which are clearly
grammatical and not hard to understand:

> Anyone [who saw the woman [who committed the crime] at any point] should be
> questioned.

Others are very hard to understand:

> Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned.

There are many factors that make a sentence hard to understand, not just
degree of embedding. Some degree 2 sentences can be easy, and some degree 1
sentences can be hard (e.g. "the horse [raced past the barn] fell", which has
only 1 level of embedding).

So if you want to describe English with the rule "no embedding beyond 1 level"
then you're going to miss a lot of valid sentences while also failing to rule
out lots of invalid ones.

Contrast this with a valid descriptive rule of English, such as "determiners
such as 'the' always come before the nouns they modify". I can say "the man
died", but "man the died" is never comprehensible under any circumstances and
cannot be made better.

No one would say that a sentence with 10 levels of embedding is perfectly fine
English. But descriptively, you have the problem that there is no _non-
arbitrary_ upper bound on embedding degree: it's not clear when one more level
of embedding takes you from grammatical to ungrammatical, and furthermore it
depends on the contents of the embedded clauses.

There is also some work I'm aware of, currently in prep for publication,
showing that the extent to which people can understand multiply-embedded
sentences strongly correlates with IQ (measured by Raven's matrices).

All this suggests that the simplest descriptive rule is to say that English
allows center-embedding recursively, but that there are human processing
limitations on sentences that create very deep stacks. The "human processing
limitations" part is basically the whole field of psycholinguistics: many
details have been worked out, but many details are still sketchy.

[1] Karlsson (2007):
[http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1056752)

~~~
morgante
Thanks for sharing the research, it's fascinating that there has actually been
serious investigation of this.

That being said, I still think the rule of 1 level still makes sense (not that
all 1 level embeds are valid or easy, but that all embeds beyond 1 level are
invalid).

> Anyone [who saw [the woman who committed the crime] at any point] should be
> questioned.

That sentence has two complementisers, which the OP's sentence specifically
did not. Introducing complementisers completely changes the rules and I think
makes embedding much more possible.

------
willvarfar
The name "garden path" reminds me that during my Turbo Pascal loving 80s I
played with making “fog” from markov chains. The idea was to computer-generate
reasonable-reading nonsense text and I'm sure you've all tried it as kids too!
:)

Of course my naive approach suffered from lack of corpus; if it picked a rare
word, it’d get railroaded into using the very limited set of words that follow
that rare word and so on.

I remember running it - this was before the internet days, so I can’t imagine
where I got the input text from - and getting back a page-full of
gobbledygook. And there right in the middle, somehow drawing the eye like a
magnet, was one of those railroaded sentences:

 _herbaceous_

Well when your random roulette picks the word herbaceous, its likely only seen
it once or so in its learning text, so there aren’t so many words it can pick
next:

 _herbaceous border_

So far so good. But where does this lead next?

 _herbaceous border disputes_

Love it!

~~~
Swizec
I could swear you've posted this exact comment before.

Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase:

[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-
spam-posts-on-a-forum-i-keep-an-eye-on-are)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparing_automatic_poetry_generators/)?

[https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra...](https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_trainergenerator_in_29_sloc_of/?sort=qa)

[http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-
doesn%E2%80%99...](http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-
doesn%E2%80%99t-have)

But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time
somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do
you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste?

I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.

~~~
uououuttt
Whoa, did you realize that you commented on it 3 years ago in that second
reddit link?

Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!

~~~
feintruled
But this is wonderful! In the context of the discussion..

The guy who had told the story before who had told the guy who had told the
story before had forgotten had forgotten.

------
mpclark
"the poor aerodynamic properties of bananas [citation needed]"

Worth reading just for that little bit of precision.

~~~
zxcdw
Not to nitpick, but yet another partial quote. Bravo.

------
Stratoscope
I would love to see a garden path sentence at the beginning of this Wikipedia
article.

The second sentence, in a paragraph of its own, would explain what just
happened.

I doubt this would ever get past the serious folks at the 'pedia.

But if it did... That would be the difference between awesome and mundane.

~~~
lmm
Maybe tvtropes will have a page on it; they seem like the heirs to the awesome
fun place wikipedia used to be.

------
Tomte
I think in real-world situations speakers would prefer "fruit flies like
bananas", which may also be a garden path sentence, but its resolution seems
much easier to me.

Do native speakers concur?

Is there any research whether speakers do prefer utterances like my example in
practice due to this property?

~~~
zodiac
In real-world situations the stress falls on different words depending on
which parse of "fruit flies like a banana" you are adopting

------
oneeyedpigeon
I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in
some cases, but not all. For example,

    
    
      The horse raced past the barn fell
    

should never be written like that. The fix is:

    
    
      The horse, raced past the barn, fell
    

But:

    
    
      The old man the boat
    

really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

~~~
ghayes
Sure, though a substantive adjective followed by a noun-verb homonym will
almost always cause this phenomenon (to varying degrees):

The crooked defect home.

The hot lead the cold.

The quick pace themselves.

The wet tear off their wet clothes.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Nice examples. "Old man" is a much more common adjective/noun construct than
"wet tear", "crooked defect", and maybe even "quick pace", though, so I think
these are slightly easier to parse. But "hot lead" is excellent :-)

------
Tobold
That's the first time I understood "fruit flies like a banana" as a pun -.- To
be fair, I'm not a native speaker.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It _ahem_ flies past many native speakers initially

~~~
mikeash
I wonder if you can come to any conclusion about the psychology of a person
based on which meaning they hear initially.

~~~
nisse72
One word geek test: pronounce "coax" :)

------
berkes
The sidebar shows two other languages for this Lemma, the Dutch one is
interesting:

* _Intuinzinnen_ , From the Dutch proverbs "ergens intuinen" of "om de tuin geleid worden". Literally: To "be gardened into something", or "to be led around the garden." Both meaning the same as "lead someone down the garden path"

Seams the proverb is nearly similar in both languages. Which makes me wonder
whether they originated from the same word. After all, Dutch and English (And
German, Danish and Swedish) have the same common ancestor.

Or whether they describe the same, in the past generally known effect of
garden paths leading to unexpected dead ends.

~~~
Someone
No. 'tuin' etymologically is 'town'. Both originally described an enclosure
(around a piece of ground). From there, it became the piece of ground within
in both languages
([http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=town](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=town))

Garden is from French (jardin)

Back to the proverb: the dutch one seems to be about "keeping someone from
that what is important/the truth" by not letting them in.

------
dandare
As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a
thing in English language.

~~~
function_seven
Ha, yup. I think a good corollary is prefix vs. infix notation in programing
languages. With prefix (or RPN) notation, it's impossible to be led down the
garden path. The rules are simple and unambiguous.

For example, 4+5×3 is a garden path, where reading left-to-right you may think
to yourself, "four plus five is nine, then nine times... wait, I have to
backtrack and handle _five_ times three first..."

Whereas + 4 × 5 3 can't be confused. (Or 4 5 3 × + in RPN)

I'm not a (good) speaker of any other language than English, but I can see how
adjective/verb/noun ordering in different languages can prevent this problem.

~~~
jloughry
And this sentence:

    
    
        The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried.
    

measures the depth of the stack in human brains.

~~~
function_seven
Yeah, it exceeded my own stack :). Is it, "The boy hit the dog, the dog then
bit the girl, who then cried?"

Some of those verbs are binary operators (transitive), others are unary
(intransitive).

~~~
jloughry
Argh! You're right; I got the words out of order. It should be:

    
    
        The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried.
    

I tried parenthesising it; I tried Lisp syntax (you're right; it's the mix of
direct and indirect objects that complicates things); nothing worked. It's a
diabolical sentence. The best I could come up with was this:

In step 1, the dog bit the boy.

In step 2, the boy hit the girl.

In step 3, the girl cried.

------
Natanael_L
Sounds like human sentence parsing is better fit for handling predefined
definitions and additive sentence building, and isn't fit for recursion.

~~~
tmalsburg2
Nah, this just means that language did not evolve to be written. In spoken
language, these ambiguities are not a problem because of prosodic cues. Also,
non-recursive languages are not necessarily unambiguous, which shows that this
problem is not tied to recursion.

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rikkus
After I read the article self-destructed!

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foxhedgehog
Shakespeare loves to do this: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer..."

~~~
kccqzy
I don't think that's an example of a garden path sentence though. My initial
parse is "whether or not suffering in the mind is nobler". "In the mind" is an
adverbial phrase that modifies "to suffer". Am I missing anything?

~~~
petercooper
Maybe I've misunderstood all this time, but I thought "in the mind" meant to
_think_ about suffering, not literally suffer _in_ the mind. That is to say,
more like "whether or not one thinks suffering is nobler".

------
Kenp77
This is awesome!

