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