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Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate that human beings process language one word at a time. The name refers to the saying "to be led up the garden path", meaning "to be misled". As one reads a garden path sentence, a structure is built up one word at a time. At some point, it becomes clear that the reader has been building an incorrect structure because the next word doesn't fit into that structure. At this point, the reader must re-analyze the structure and integrate the remainder of the sentence into a new structure.

Contents 1 Examples 2 Garden-path jokes 3 See also 4 Notes 5 External links

[edit] Examples

A few illustrative examples of garden path sentences:

• The horse raced past the barn fell.

  The reader usually starts to parse this as an ordinary active intransitive sentence, but stumbles when reaching the word "fell." At this point, the reader is forced to backtrack and look for other possible structures. It may take some rereading to realize that "raced past the barn" is in fact a reduced relative clause with a passive participle, implying that "fell" is the main verb. The correct reading is then: "The horse (that was raced past the barn) fell."

  This sentence can be parsed in other ways as well,^[1] but that is irrelevant to its status as a garden path sentence.

  The example hinges on the ambiguity of the lexical category of the word "raced": it can be either a past-tense verb or a passive participle.

Compare with a sentence of the same structure but without lexical ambiguity:

• The car driven past the barn crashed.

  This example's status as a garden-path sentence consists in readers' or hearers' experience of pursuing one obvious-seeming parse, only to discover that it leads to an unsatisfactory (in this case an ungrammatical) result, then mentally returning (so to speak) to an earlier point in the structure and achieving a correct parse by different means. The point is not that people cannot understand it correctly the first time they hear it—that actually is possible—but rather that they so often do not do so, and so experience a double-take.

Other examples of garden path sentences are:

Sentence	Initial likely partial parse	Final parse
The old man the boat.	The man who is old does something.	The boat is manned by the old people.
The man whistling tunes pianos.	The man who is whistling musically does something.	The man who is whistling also tunes pianos.
The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.	The clothing (made of cotton) is made of some fabric	The cotton that clothing is made of is grown in Mississippi.
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.	The complicated (buildings? families?) got married to some people.	Single soldiers and their families are housed in the complex.
Obama’s ad buys dwarf TV presence of McCain.	Obama's ad buys(verb) a small TV presence of McCain.	McCain's TV presence is dwarfed by Obama's ad purchases.
The author wrote the novel was likely to be a best-seller.	The author wrote(verb) the novel ...	That author wrote that the novel was likely to be a best-seller.
The tomcat curled up on the cushion seemed friendly.	The tomcat curled up(past-tense verb) on the cushion.	The tomcat which was curled up on the cushion seemed friendly.

[edit] Garden-path jokes

A number of jokes depend on the garden path effect, often combined with more usual syntactic ambiguity. For instance, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." The first sentence starts the listener firmly down the garden path, priming for a particular parsing of the second sentence which would parallel the first. The joke hinges on the ambiguities of "fruit" (independent noun or modifier of "flies"), "flies" (singular verb or plural noun), and "like" (preposition or plural verb). Unlike the above-cited sentences, however, the expected reading of the second sentence ("A piece of fruit flies through the air the same way a banana does") is grammatically possible, though silly.

Another example of this is "What has four wheels and flies?". The answer, "a garbage truck", makes little sense until one realizes that "flies" is a noun referring to the insect rather than a verb indicating what the garbage truck does. "What has flies and four wheels?" resolves the ambiguity, but ruins the joke.

[edit] See also

• Ambiguity
• Backtracking
• List of linguistic example sentences
• Natural language processing
• Paraprosdokian
• Syntactic ambiguity
• Transderivational search

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Misinterpretations of Garden-Path Sentences: Implications for Models of Sentence Processing and Reanalysis (PDF)
• The Trouble with NLP: Some additional demonstrations of why these and similar examples are hard for computers to deal with when attempting natural language processing.