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Garden path sentence

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Re: Garden path sentence

#31

Post by morgante »

Xophmeister wrote: post #29
Jabbles wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach.

There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.

Re: Garden path sentence

#32

Post by willvarfar »

Swizec wrote: post #27
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. Do…

Yeap, all me. Its one of my fondest recollections of early programming. :)

So sorry it offends you.

Re: Garden path sentence

#33

Post by pidg »

efaref wrote: post #30
pidg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure I would add pauses when saying "the horse raced past the barn died"... mainly because in real life there'd be enough context to parse it properly. These sentences are just very artificial examples.

Re: Garden path sentence

#34

Post by Natanael_L »

morgante wrote: post #31
Xophmeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach. There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.

I would argue there's a large grey zone. It isn't binary, I'd say it is more of a spectrum between prescriptivism and descriptivism. After all, grammar and syntax isn't fully randomized even if largely arbitary. We make certain choices (even if we aren't aware of it) prescriptively which we try to teach each other (even if we aren't aware of it), and the mixing and noise creates a set of choices in the language actively in use that simply needs to be described for what it is. There's recurring patterns of various sources.

And if they allow one sentence to be understood by members of the intended audience that knows the common rules and context and usage well, then that's as valid as it gets. Even if only very few can understand it, the fact that it is possible is enough.

A bit like HTML in browsers - there's the written rules and there's what browsers do anyway, and what's valid in real life is whatever gets the point across.

Re: Garden path sentence

#35

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Garden path sentence

#36

Post by Tenhundfeld »

morgante wrote: post #31
Xophmeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach. There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.

I disagree, and FWIW, I find your tone hostile.

A prescriptivist would say it follows allowed grammar rules but is still unintelligible.

A descriptivist would say it follows common usage patterns but takes it to such an extreme as to be unintelligible.

You see this pattern more often with proper names:

- That's the house Jack built.

- That's the woman the house Jack built fell on.

- That's the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired.

- That's the briefcase the lawyer the woman the house Jack built fell on hired carried.

At what point does it become "incorrect"? When it becomes unintelligible to most native speakers?

It's also worth noting these sentences seem much stranger in writing than they do when heard. In writing, most sane people will use punctuation in the examples above. But in speaking, our tone of voice conveys enough context to use more streamlined structures.

Re: Garden path sentence

#38

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

function_seven wrote: post #3
dandare wrote: post #2

As 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…

RPN does have the advantage that it's unambiguous, yes, but if you miss a token you will end up confused.

Re: Garden path sentence

#39

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

morgante wrote: post #31
Xophmeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach. There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.

> If you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach.

How so? Surely there is room for debate within descriptivism as to what constitutes evidence of something being used?

Re: Garden path sentence

#40

Post by [deleted] »

Xophmeister wrote: post #29
Jabbles wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

[deleted]
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