Garden path sentence
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Garden path sentence
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Re: Garden path sentence
#2As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
Re: Garden path sentence
#3As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
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.
Re: Garden path sentence
#4Shakespeare loves to do this: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer..."
Re: Garden path sentence
#5Shakespeare loves to do this: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer..."
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?
Re: Garden path sentence
#6The 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!
Re: Garden path sentence
#7That's the first time I understood "fruit flies like a banana" as a pun -.-
To be fair, I'm not a native speaker.
Re: Garden path sentence
#8As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
other languages have them as well: https://www.quora.com/Are-garden-path-sentences-possible-in-... (though wikipedia claims[citation needed] it mostly affects analytic languages)
Re: Garden path sentence
#9This is awesome!
Re: Garden path sentence
#10Shakespeare loves to do this: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer..."
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?
"Is nobler" turns out to modify "in the mind."