
Garden path sentence - niyazpk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
======
RyanMcGreal
A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to
note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian,
that many garden path sentences achieve their ambiguity via hanging
prepositions, e.g.:

>The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

Yet the most general pattern seems to be a simple matter of loading too many
words into the subject clause [1], e.g.:

>The car driven past the barn crashed.

We don't reach the verb until the last word, which not only opens the door to
ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose. You will produce tighter, sharper
sentences by front-loading the predicate verb.

[1] - edited from "too many clauses" as per telemachos's astute reply.

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lkozma
"..opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose."

You wouldn't make friends in Germany :)

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lkozma
or as Twain said:

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are
going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his
verb in his mouth."

~~~
jazzyb
I have encouraged many of my friends to learn German just so they can
understand the comedic brilliance of "The Awful German Language".

For those who have studied German but haven't read Twain yet:
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language>

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edanm
Related, also very funny, a list of sentences used as examples to show various
weird language constructs:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences).

My favorite:

"In a similar vein, Martin Gardner offered the example: Wouldn't the sentence
"I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my
Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed
before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and
and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"

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niyazpk
Related: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian>

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lars512
Some quick examples:

Garden path: "The horse raced past the barn fell."

The whole meaning is changed by adding one word to the end of the sentence,
and you have to read the whole thing again to get it right. Makes hell for
software trying to parse the sentence.

Paraprosdokian: "It's too bad that whole families have to be torn apart by
something as simple as wild dogs."

The whole meaning is changed (and made funny!) by an unexpected series of
words at the end. I love the examples on the wikipedia page.

~~~
splat
And don't forget the double-Paraprosdokian! One example which springs to mind:

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=726#co...](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=726#comic)

(Remember to mouse over the red button.)

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johnfn
This is basically the entire concept of smbc.

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orborde
The process involved here seems to be a backtracking search:
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Backtracking>

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lkozma
What's interesting is that by looking at how many nested levels are still
understandable, we can also make a guess about the stack size of our brain.
(short term memory (?))

~~~
bdr
Or at least some specialized subcomponent.

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username3
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

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gjm11
Oysters oysters oysters split split split.

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username3
You've made it to result 1a on Google.
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Oysters+oysters+...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Oysters+oysters+oysters+split+split+split%22)

~~~
gjm11
In fact, at present four of the 10 front-page Google results for that query
were written by me. (Two copies of the one in this thread, plus two copies of
something on the C2 wiki. I can't be 100% sure that I wrote the latter, but
I'm pretty sure it was me.)

~~~
bdr
I love it because the sentence itself resembles an oyster.

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nooneelse
I wonder about the same phenomenon but on higher levels of organization, e.g.
concepts in an explanation. Are there valid ways to explain some concept C
such that the interpreter is led down a garden path.

More important would be the existence of exclusively garden path concepts,
call it the set EGPC. EGPC is the set of concepts which can only be arrived at
via explanations or chains of concepts and reasoning that include at least one
misleading garden path. One goal of clear teaching would seem to be reducing
the number of conceptual garden paths that students encounter; so knowing that
some subject necessitates them would be useful.

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83457
I'm noticing this while reading Under the Dome. There are many sentences where
I just stop at the last couple words because the sentence doesn't make sense
at that point. Quite a few times I thought they were typos. When I analyze the
sentence though I find that I needed to pause in another spot or use a
different meaning of a word. Haven't run into this often in other books.

~~~
83457
I didn't run into it much through the next 800 pages of the dome. I'm almost
half way through Catch-22 and it is essentially built on this type of
sentence.

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Sherlock
Weird, as a non-native and non-fluent english speaker, I don't suffer that
effect.

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michael_dorfman
Really? How does that work?

Do you read the entire sentence, before trying to parse the grammar?

For example, when reading "The man returned to his house was happy", you don't
provisionally interpret "The man returned to his house" as meaningful?

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Sherlock
I suppose that i read the entire sentence before parsing it, just because i
need a slight rational effort to decode it.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Interesting.

I'm a native English speaker, living in a foreign country, so I spend most of
my day working with a language I'm not completely fluent in, and I find I do
the opposite-- I'm trying to put the meaning together word by word as the
sentence unfolds, which makes reading things with long, Proustian sentences
very difficult.

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zackham
I did a presentation a few years ago on some studies about using prosody to
resolve sentence ambiguities. The improvement in listener comprehension was
measurable and dramatic. The easy conclusion to draw is that leveraging
prosody in your day-to-day speech makes you better understood because the
listener doesn't have to devote as much conscious attention to figuring out
what you're trying to say.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)>

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bmalicoat
I learned about these in a linguistics course in college. My favorite from
back then was, "The building blocks the sun faded toppled."

Depending on how you are led down it, you might have two abrupt and
unanticipated words at the end.

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Tycho
I remember encountering several of these at the start of Van Vogt's sci-fi
classic _World of Null-A_. I couldn't figure out if it was deliberate in any
way, or just an annoying accident.

~~~
tygorius
I don't remember particular sentences like that, but it wouldn't surprise me
if it were at least partially intentional. Ambiguity is one of the main
components of hypnotic inductions, and van Vogt was a lay expert on hypnosis.
(He co-authored "The Hypnotism Handbook" with Charles Cooke, for example.)

It's said that van Vogt would sometimes rely on unconscious processing and
"dream logic" (for want of a better term) in his writing processes, so those
sentences you noticed might well have been both "accidental" and unconsciously
intentional.

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sliverstorm
> the garden path effect is created by a (grammatically allowed) lack of
> punctuation

Take THAT, grammar nazis!

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ww520
It won't be fun when talking about garden path sentence without bringing up
the epitome of them all, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
Buffalo buffalo."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo).

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apmee
Great as that is, it's not really a garden path sentence, as there's no
element of being misled. It looks absurd from the outset.

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AndyKelley
Yes it is. Read it again.

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JBiserkov
_Microsoft Windows Malicious Software removal tool_

No, it doesn't remove Windows.

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JoeAltmaier
My dad used to say "Throw the cow over the fence, some hay"

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scrod
Which stove did Rolf saute the broccoli with the sesame seed oil next to?

