“‘Garden-path sentences’ are so-called because as we listen (or read) them, we are actively interpreting the sentence word-by-word, and building an interpretation by considering each word as it arrives,” says Ailis Cournane, professor of linguistics at New York University.
20 Garden Path Sentences You Won’t Read Right the First Time ...
Reader’s Digest walks you through some common garden path sentences below. Can you figure out what they’re trying to say? We’ll reveal the explanations, so keep reading.
Garden path sentences are sentences that mislead or trick their reader into interpreting the sentence incorrectly. Garden path sentences take their name from the idiom, “to be led down the garden path.”
Accordingly, from a psycholinguistic perspective, garden path sentences are sentences in which a certain syntactic structure is initially assigned to an ambiguous portion of a sentence, but is eventually discovered to be syntactically inconsistent with later parts of the sentence.
“The Horse Raced Past the Barn Fell”: A Guide to Garden Path Sentences ...
Garden path sentences are sentences that seem to mean one thing at first, but later words show that the structure is different. Your brain takes the most likely path, then has to back up and reinterpret the sentence.
My favourite garden path sentences the-owls-are-not-what-they-seem: “ The horse raced past the barn fell. The florist sent the flowers was pleased. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a...
Confused yet? Keep reading to find out what these strange-sounding but perfectly grammatical garden path sentences are saying. Besides sounding like a rejected Ernest Hemingway title, this deceptive ...
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; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.