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Garden path sentence

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Re: Garden path sentence

#21

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example,

  The horse raced past the barn fell
should never be written like that. The fix is:

  The horse, raced past the barn, fell
But:

  The old man the boat
really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

Re: Garden path sentence

#22

Post by PuffinBlue »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example, The horse raced past the barn fell should never be written like that. The fix is: The horse, raced past the barn, fell But: The old man the boat really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

I concur about the grammatical fixes.

As a native British English speaker I didn't actually have any trouble parsing any of the sentences save for the "The horse raced past the barn fell" because it was written without the customary punctuational scaffolding.

'The old man the boat' seemed fine to me too, not sure why.

I'd be interested to hear if other British English folks had much trouble with these sentences. Perhaps it's a by product of being exposed to too many 'dad jokes' (Fruit flies like a banana) but perhaps it's a more general condition of British English humour that made me feel familiar with this type of sentence structure.

Re: Garden path sentence

#23

Post by ghayes »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example, The horse raced past the barn fell should never be written like that. The fix is: The horse, raced past the barn, fell But: The old man the boat really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

Sure, though a substantive adjective followed by a noun-verb homonym will almost always cause this phenomenon (to varying degrees):

The crooked defect home.

The hot lead the cold.

The quick pace themselves.

The wet tear off their wet clothes.

Re: Garden path sentence

#24

Post by Xophmeister »

A similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically) infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and "which"). So you get unparsable things like:

   The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked.
...punctuated and complementised makes it slightly better:

   The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked.
...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics subtly but significantly:

   The mouse feared the cat, who loathed the dog who barked.
I say "technically" because there's nothing stopping you from doing this, but in reality, even one level of embedding can be borderline nonsensical (e.g., the "The horse raced past the barn fell" example).

Re: Garden path sentence

#25

Post by pidg »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example, The horse raced past the barn fell should never be written like that. The fix is: The horse, raced past the barn, fell But: The old man the boat really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

> should never be written like that

In my view it's as valid as something like:

  The dog with the red nose died
which would never be written

  The dog, with the red nose, died
Just because it's not easy to parse doesn't mean there's a hard-and-fast rule about adding punctuation.

Re: Garden path sentence

#26

Post by Jabbles »

Xophmeister wrote: post #24

A similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically) infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and "which"). So you get unparsable things like: The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked. ...punctuated and complementised makes it slightly better: The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked. ...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics…

You can't "technically" do that. Which "rule" (from which rulebook) do you think allows you to arbitrarily repeat structures?

Re: Garden path sentence

#27

Post by Swizec »

willvarfar wrote: post #6

The 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…

I could swear you've posted this exact comment before.

Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase:

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...?

https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra...

http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99...

But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste?

I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.

Re: Garden path sentence

#29

Post by Xophmeister »

Jabbles wrote: post #26
Xophmeister wrote: post #24

A similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically) infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and "which"). So you get unparsable things like: The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked. ...punctuated and complementised makes it slightly better: The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked. ...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics…

You can't "technically" do that. Which "rule" (from which rulebook) do you think allows you to arbitrarily repeat structures?

There's no rulebook when it comes to syntax (grammar), unless you're a prescriptivist. There is plenty of precedent for embedding subclauses (e.g., "Here is a sentence, that I just made up, which has an embedded subclause."), but -- beyond anecdotal data -- there is no hard cut-off point to how many times you are permitted to embed. Empirically, most people don't like more than one level, but plenty of people allow it; thus it becomes more a function of cerebral load than it does an argument of permitted structures.

Re: Garden path sentence

#30

Post by efaref »

pidg wrote: post #25
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example, The horse raced past the barn fell should never be written like that. The fix is: The horse, raced past the barn, fell But: The old man the boat really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

> should never be written like that In my view it's as valid as something like: The dog with the red nose died which would never be written The dog, with the red nose, died Just because it's not easy to parse doesn't mean there's a hard-and-fast rule about adding punctuation.

You add punctuation like you add pauses: to aid understanding.
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