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Garden path sentence

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Re: Garden path sentence

#61

Post by Tenhundfeld »

morgante wrote: post #46
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you point me to the rule disallowing arbitrary nesting? I'm not aware of a rule existing in either direction, besides vague guidelines to write clearly.

Also, which example is 1 level of nesting? I think "That's the woman the house Jack built fell on." is 2 levels nesting, and I frequently hear constructs like that – in speaking. I agree it's rarer in writing though.

For example: What server is that? That's the server the consultant Jack brought in set up.

I'd never write that, because it's confusing. But I will naturally say things like that, without any problem in clarity, because you have more granular control over grouping and pausing, etc. If I said a sentence like that, you might hear it more as "That's the server the-consultant-Jack-brought-in set up."

Anyway, sorry if I misread your tone. It just came across very much as "I know what's right, and you're wrong." That might have been me projecting though. :)

Re: Garden path sentence

#62

Post by kenbellows »

morgante wrote: post #46
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By and large, the rules I learned in various English and grammar classes, beyond the initial sentence structure, were prohibitive rather than permissive; there's no rule explicitly _allowing_ arbitrary nesting, because why would need a rule to specify that, but there's also no rule that I'm aware of that _prohibits_ arbitrary nesting.

In fact, the "rule" that matters here is general sentence structure. It's fine to embed a single secondary clause inside a primary clause:

  That's the woman [the house Jack built] fell on.
The structure of the inner clause has no further restrictions on it than the structure of the outer clause. Thus, the entire above sentence is perfectly valid as an inner clause to a new outer clause:

   That's the lawyer [the woman  fell on] hired.
There's nothing in any grammar book that I'm aware of explicitly prohibiting infinite nesting of this sort; it's just silly and quickly becomes unintelligible. Though I definitely take Tenhundfeld's point that this sort of structure is a lot more common in spoken language, and in fact it's a lot more easily comprehensible with the aid of vocal cues and tones.

Re: Garden path sentence

#63

Post by xenophonf »

zodiac wrote: post #55
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?

Well, you can go from "The cat meowed" to "The cat the mouse feared meowed" If your claim is that nesting to arbitrary depths is not allowed, what is the maximum depth that is "legal"?

My guess is when the parse tree exhausts short term memory. I have no problem reading the sentence with a single nested clause ("the cat the mouse..."), but the one with a doubly nested clause is unreadable ("the dog the cat the mouse..."). Greater nesting levels might be grammatical in an abstract sense but is extremely difficult for people to understand, much like how it's possible to come up with legal C code that results in indeterminate behavior.

Re: Garden path sentence

#64

Post by Natanael_L »

morgante wrote: post #46
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying it stops at level 1 implies the valid rule of embedding is a special case itself of an invalid general rule, rather than it being a general rule itself. If the special case is the most common case, does that really imply only the special case is valid? Why?

Re: Garden path sentence

#65

Post by mcphage »

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…

> Google finds four results of this phrase

> Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains

I haven't done any actual counting, but I'm like 80% sure Markov Chains have been mentioned more than 4 times on the internet.

Re: Garden path sentence

#66

Post by prezjordan »

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…

This is why I love Lisp so much.

Re: Garden path sentence

#67

Post by mikeash »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #37
Tobold wrote: post #7

That's the first time I understood "fruit flies like a banana" as a pun -.- To be fair, I'm not a native speaker.

It ahem flies past many native speakers initially

I wonder if you can come to any conclusion about the psychology of a person based on which meaning they hear initially.

Re: Garden path sentence

#68

Post by mikeash »

jloughry wrote: post #53
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…

And this sentence: The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried. measures the depth of the stack in human brains.

I think I've suffered an overflow, and I bet it's exploitable too.

Re: Garden path sentence

#69

Post by HCIdivision17 »

willvarfar wrote: post #32
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…

Yeap, all me. Its one of my fondest recollections of early programming. :) So sorry it offends you.

Heh, I think it's actually useful. Cross-posting is sort of a form of intellectual cross-pollination; some people are allergic, but others appreciate the second chances. I don't read those other forums, so I'd have missed out on that little nugget.

And I tried to make that last sentence a garden path one, to keep the comment on topic, but jeez it's hard to break the habit of avoiding them. I suspect it's deeply ingrained in me to an instinctual level by my 11th grade rhetoric teacher. (Her whole goal was to, and I quote, "make our insides scrunch when we saw a comma splice." Most who took her class would agree her curriculum was a resounding success, even after she also taught us to break the rules.)

Re: Garden path sentence

#70

Post by canjobear »

morgante wrote: post #46
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's empirical work on this [1] (alas, paywalled): multiple center embedding in speech is rare but exists. It is more common in writing.

There are examples of 2 levels of center-embedding which are clearly grammatical and not hard to understand:

> Anyone [who saw the woman [who committed the crime] at any point] should be questioned.

Others are very hard to understand:

> Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned.

There are many factors that make a sentence hard to understand, not just degree of embedding. Some degree 2 sentences can be easy, and some degree 1 sentences can be hard (e.g. "the horse [raced past the barn] fell", which has only 1 level of embedding).

So if you want to describe English with the rule "no embedding beyond 1 level" then you're going to miss a lot of valid sentences while also failing to rule out lots of invalid ones.

Contrast this with a valid descriptive rule of English, such as "determiners such as 'the' always come before the nouns they modify". I can say "the man died", but "man the died" is never comprehensible under any circumstances and cannot be made better.

No one would say that a sentence with 10 levels of embedding is perfectly fine English. But descriptively, you have the problem that there is no non-arbitrary upper bound on embedding degree: it's not clear when one more level of embedding takes you from grammatical to ungrammatical, and furthermore it depends on the contents of the embedded clauses.

There is also some work I'm aware of, currently in prep for publication, showing that the extent to which people can understand multiply-embedded sentences strongly correlates with IQ (measured by Raven's matrices).

All this suggests that the simplest descriptive rule is to say that English allows center-embedding recursively, but that there are human processing limitations on sentences that create very deep stacks. The "human processing limitations" part is basically the whole field of psycholinguistics: many details have been worked out, but many details are still sketchy.

[1] Karlsson (2007): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

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