Garden Path Sentence

Sentence where structural cues lexical ambiguity or a combination of both mislead the reader or listener to an incorrect interpretation until a disambiguating cue appears later in the sentence.

Garden path sentence. A garden path sentence is ambiguous at the beginning. Essentially when you read a garden path sentence you encounter an ambiguous part that has multiple possible interpretations one of which. Garden path sentences are not unlike predictive text cournane says. A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader s most likely interpretation will be incorrect.

A garden path sentence is a sentence with an ambiguous part that leads the reader to initially assume a certain interpretation for the sentence until they reach a point where the ambiguity is resolved and this initial interpretation is shown to be wrong. Garden path sentences below are some garden path sentences. Fat people eat accumulates. Sometimes we predict wrongly and get puzzled.

Garden path refers to the saying to be led down or up the garden path meaning to be deceived tricked or seduced. They are alike in that when one reads them one frequently experiences some confusion and has to restart the parse. This can happen in several ways. Sentence structures in our language allow us to predict and structure what categories of words follow others and are part of our tacit knowledge as speakers of a language.

The metaphor is being led down the garden path. There are many types of ambiguity. The prime number few. For example in the following sentence the word bank could mean the edge of a river or a financial institution.

The reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. A sentence that is easily incorrectly parsed on a first read due to ambiguity of a word or words. John went to the bank. Also called a syntactic garden path sentence.

Noun plural garden path sentences 2. When you interpret a word wrongly you will end your reading of the sentence feeling that what you read was very odd. A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when fir. Despite this they are all.

Ambiguity garden path sentences if a sentence is ambiguous it can have more than one meaning. So garden path sentences are often caused by confusion about the literal and figurative meaning of words and when there is confusion about the word class of certain words in the sentence.