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Garden path sentence

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Re: Garden path sentence

#41

Post by logingone »

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 ... So you get unparsable things...

If it's not parseable, then surely you can't.

Re: Garden path sentence

#42

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

ghayes wrote: post #23
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.

Nice examples. "Old man" is a much more common adjective/noun construct than "wet tear", "crooked defect", and maybe even "quick pace", though, so I think these are slightly easier to parse. But "hot lead" is excellent :-)

Re: Garden path sentence

#43

Post by uououuttt »

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…

Whoa, did you realize that you commented on it 3 years ago in that second reddit link?

Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!

Re: Garden path sentence

#44

Post by taliesinb »

uououuttt wrote: post #43
Swizec wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whoa, did you realize that you commented on it 3 years ago in that second reddit link? Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!

That got surreal fast!

Re: Garden path sentence

#45

Post by bshimmin »

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…

Steven Pinker has a nice one of these:

  The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable.

Re: Garden path sentence

#46

Post by morgante »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #36
morgante wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

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

Beyond 1 level of nesting. There's no rule allowing arbitrary nesting, nor do people commonly nest beyond 1 level.

I'm not sure where you saw hostility in my comment.

Re: Garden path sentence

#47

Post by taliesinb »

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…

The ad absurdim example of this phenomenon is the Buffalo buffalo sentence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buff...

Here's a toy Python parser I wrote many years ago actually listing out all valid parses of this sentence: https://github.com/taliesinb/chartreuse/blob/master/README.m...

Re: Garden path sentence

#48

Post by gjm11 »

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.

> The horse, raced past the barn, fell

But that changes the meaning. Consider a situation where you have two horses. One of them has been raced past the barn; the other never has. This matters because inside the barn there is an alien artefact emitting radiation that weakens the muscles. But that was yesterday. Today you have sent both horses out for another canter -- and one of them has suffered a fall. Tell me, Igor, which one was it? Did the radiation from the alien artefact cause the trouble? "The horse raced past the barn fell."

But the version with the commas is only applicable when (1) you already know which horse is being referred to and (2) the fall happens in racing past the barn or at least as an immediate consequence, it seems to me.

Re: Garden path sentence

#49

Post by jjnoakes »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #38
function_seven wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Won't you be confused if you miss a token in a non-RPN parse?
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