Garden-path sentence
A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. Garden path refers to the saying "wikt:lead someone up the garden path|to be led down the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".
Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing. Though these sentences are grammatically correct, such sentences are syntactically non-standard as evidenced by the need for re-reading and careful parsing. Garden-path sentences are not usually desirable in writing that is intended to communicate clearly.
Examples
"The old man the boat."
This is a common example that has been the subject of psycholinguistic research and has been used to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence efforts. The difficulty in correctly parsing the sentence results from the fact that readers tend to interpret old as an adjective. Reading the, they expect a noun or an adjective to follow, and when they then read old followed by man they assume that the phrase the old man is to be interpreted as determiner – adjective – noun. When readers encounter another the following the supposed noun man, they are forced to re-analyze the sentence. As with other examples, one explanation for initial reader misunderstanding is that a sequence of words or phrases tends to be analyzed in terms of a frequent pattern: in this case: determiner – adjective – noun. Rephrased, the sentence could be rewritten as "Those who man the boat are old.""The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
This is another commonly cited example. Like the previous sentence, the initial parse is to read the complex houses as a noun phrase, but the complex houses married does not make semantic sense and the complex houses married and single makes no sense at all. The correct parsing is The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families ."The horse raced past the barn fell."
This frequently used, classic example of a garden-path sentence is attributed to Thomas Bever. The sentence is hard to parse because raced can be interpreted as a finite verb or as a passive participle. Readers initially interprets raced as the main verb in the simple past, but when they encounters fell, they are forced to re-analyze the sentence, concluding that raced is being used as a passive participle and horse is the direct object of the subordinate clause. The sentence could be replaced by "The horse that was raced past the barn fell", where that was raced past the barn tells the readers which horse is under discussion. Such examples of initial ambiguity resulting from a "reduced relative with potentially intransitive verb" can be contrasted with the lack of ambiguity for a non-reduced relative or with a reduced relative with an unambiguously transitive verb. As with other examples, one explanation for initial reader misunderstanding is that a sequence of phrases tends to be analyzed in terms of the frequent pattern: agent – action – patient.In other languages
Chinese
"本食堂欢迎新老师生前来就餐。"This sentence can be interpreted in two ways:
"The canteen welcomes new and old teachers and students to come and dine here."
This interpretation would be the most natural in a typical context. It implies that the canteen welcomes new and old teachers and students, indicating a general invitation to all.
"The canteen welcomes new teachers to come and dine here when they are alive."
This interpretation might seem more awkward and unnatural in regular usage. The phrase "生前" typically refers to "while alive" or "before death." While this interpretation could be grammatically correct, it introduces a somewhat bizarre and formal tone, making it sound like the canteen only welcomes teachers who are alive, which seems overly specific and strange for such a context.
So, the more natural and probable meaning is the first one, where the canteen is simply extending a welcoming message to both new and old teachers and students.
German
"Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen, denn sie sind aus Holz und im feuchten Keller gelagert worden."This example turns on the two meanings of German modern: the adjective meaning English 'modern', and the verb meaning 'to rot'.
The theme of the "picture exhibition" in the first clause lends itself to interpreting modern as an adjective meaning 'contemporary', until the last two words of the sentence:
- 'Most of all, it is the picture frames in this exhibition that are becoming modern, because they are made out of wood, and had been stored in the dank cellar.'
- 'Most of all, it is the picture frames in this exhibition that are becoming moldy, because they are made out of wood and had been stored in the dank cellar.'
Portuguese
"Mãe suspeita da morte do filho e foge."This example makes use of the ambiguity between the verb suspeita and the adjective suspeita, which is also captured by the English word suspect. It also makes use of a misreading in which the word e is passed over by the parser, which lends to two different meanings.
- In a first parse, the sentence might be read as ' mother suspect of son's death runs away.' In this sentence, the suspeita serves as an adjective for the mother who runs away due to the fact that e is easily overlooked.
- A second parse, however, reveals the true reading of the sentence to be ' mother suspects son's death and runs away.' Suspeita now serves as a verb and reveals that a mother suspects that her son might be dead.
French
The ambiguity hinges on the word "pas" which can be a negative particle as in "Je ne sais pas" or a noun meaning "step" as in "Je fais un pas en avant"
Thus the sign can be understood as "pas de" = no + "porte" = door + "à vendre" = for sale; thus the meaning would be "No door for sale"
The second parse recognises the legal term "pas de porte" = "lease" or "leasehold" and the meaning becomes "Leasehold for sale".
Parsing
When reading a sentence, readers will analyze the words and phrases they see and make inferences about the sentence’s grammatical structure and meaning in a process called parsing. Generally, readers will parse the sentence chunks at a time and will try to interpret the meaning of the sentence at each interval. As readers are given more information, they make an assumption of the contents and meaning of the whole sentence. With each new portion of the sentence encountered, they will try to make that part make sense with the sentence structures that they have already interpreted and their assumption about the rest of the sentence. The garden-path sentence effect occurs when the sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way and, when they read the whole sentence, there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected. The reader must then read and evaluate the sentence again to understand its meaning. The sentence may be parsed and interpreted in different ways due to the influence of pragmatics, semantics, or other factors describing the extralinguistic context.Parsing strategies
Various strategies can be used when parsing a sentence, and there is much debate over which parsing strategy humans use. Differences in parsing strategies can be seen from the effects of a reader attempting to parse a part of a sentence that is ambiguous in its syntax or meaning. For this reason, garden-path sentences are often studied as a way to test which strategy humans use. Two debated parsing strategies that humans are thought to use are serial and parallel parsing.Serial parsing is where the reader makes one interpretation of the ambiguity and continues to parse the sentence in the context of that interpretation. The reader will continue to use the initial interpretation as reference for future parsing until disambiguating information is given.
Parallel parsing is where the reader recognizes and generates multiple interpretations of the sentence and stores them until disambiguating information is given, at which point only the correct interpretation is maintained.