Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One word geek test: pronounce "coax" :)
Garden path sentence
81–87 of 87 posts
Re: Garden path sentence
#82As a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
It's a thing in all languages.
To say that it exists in all languages is perhaps a bit strong, but, yes, most do. However, there are difference in the degree to which ambiguities occur. German, for example, has many morphological cues that allow the comprehender to rule out alternative interpretations. The price is that German tends to be slightly more verbose.
Re: Garden path sentence
#83Sounds like human sentence parsing is better fit for handling predefined definitions and additive sentence building, and isn't fit for recursion.
Nah, this just means that language did not evolve to be written. In spoken language, these ambiguities are not a problem because of prosodic cues. Also, non-recursive languages are not necessarily unambiguous, which shows that this problem is not tied to recursion.
Re: Garden path sentence
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this sentence: The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried. measures the depth of the stack in human brains.
Yeah, it exceeded my own stack :). Is it, "The boy hit the dog, the dog then bit the girl, who then cried?" Some of those verbs are binary operators (transitive), others are unary (intransitive).
Argh! You're right; I got the words out of order. It should be:
The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried.
In step 1, the dog bit the boy.
In step 2, the boy hit the girl.
In step 3, the girl cried.
Re: Garden path sentence
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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] ki…
> Anyone [who the man [who the woman shot] killed] should be questioned.
Even with the brackets, I don't understand this one. Anyone killed by the man should be questioned?
(Also, shouldn't they both be 'whom'?)
Re: Garden path sentence
#86I 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.
> For example,
> > The horse raced past the barn fell
> should never be written like that.
Surely it can, and must, be so written if the thing past which the horse raced was, as Wikipedia mentions, "the fell by or at the barn"?
Re: Garden path sentence
#87I 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.
I don't know whether "the hot lead the cold" and "the wet tear off their clothes" are made easier, or harder, to parse by the fact that when one (or at least I) reads them, one assigns a pronunciation to the 3rd word en passant. (I picked correctly, as it turned out, so don't know how hard it is to overcome the effect of a wrong choice.)