Meaning of garden path sentence | Babel Free

Definitions

A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to the ambiguity of a word or words.

Equivalents

Examples

“Whether a particular construction causes a garden-path effect depends on the specific grammar of the language. For example, the famous example of an English garden-path sentence in (1) ["The horse raced past the barn fell"] would not exist⟳ if the past tense form⟳ of the verb race⟳ were not identical to the reduced relative form⟳, the former of which is the preferred reading for this sentence.”

“One of the functions of punctuation is to reduce⟳ any ambiguity, and readers are less confused by garden-path sentences that are punctuated than by those that are not[…].”

“[I]n a garden path sentence, we interpret⟳ a sentence in a particular way only to find⟳ out near the end⟳ that we misinterpreted it. The subjective impression is that of being led down a garden path until discovering at the end⟳ that we took the wrong way and have⟳ to retrace our steps.”

“A garden path sentence contains a temporary ambiguity[…]. It becomes clear that something has gone wrong when the comprehender receives input that is incompatible with the past-tense analysis of the ambiguous form⟳[…]. The parser then must abandon its initial parse and attempt⟳ to reanalyze the input.”

CEFR level