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Do native speakers concur?
Is there any research whether speakers do prefer utterances like my example in practice due to this property?
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.
As 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)
The details of the grammar of the languages makes the methods one can use to achieve the initially ambiguous parse different, though.
As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
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.
* 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.
Shakespeare 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?
Worth reading just for that little bit of precision.