Up the Garden Path!

So-called ‘garden path’ sentences are often cited as evidence by people studying and working on language.   The idea is that in examples such as (1) and (2), the reader is ‘led up the garden path’ towards an incorrect interpretation.  However, when they reach the end of the sentence, they find that their interpretation doesn't make sense, and they have to go back and construct a completely different interpretation.

(1)    Fat people eat accumulates

(2)    The horse raced past the barn fell

So, for example, consider the sentence in (1).  If I write the first three words of this on a board and ask my students what they think will come next, they invariably say some something like ‘cake’, ‘chips’ or ‘too much’. 

This is strong evidence that we process language ‘on-line’.  It seems clear that when processing (1), we have already begun to build a syntactic representation before we get anywhere near the end of the sentence.   We have decided that ‘Fat people’ is the subject of the sentence, and that ‘eat’ is the main verb, and so we are expecting to find an object coming up next.  This process of assigning a structure and syntactic roles to a sentence is called parsing, and garden path sentences provide strong evidence that our parsing systems are predictive. 

Just like predictive text messaging, we try to anticipate what we think is coming next, and just like predictive text messaging, we sometimes get this wrong!

‘Accumulates’ is not a noun, and so once the complete sentence is revealed, we are forced to go back and build a different structure and assign different roles.

The trouble with garden path utterances is that the same old examples tend to be given and discussed again and again, and at times they can seem quite artificial. Do people really ever write or say sentences such as (1) and (2)?  With this in mind,  I was intrigued this morning to find myself genuinely garden-pathed by a sentence I read on my twitter feed.  It was a tweet from the science writer Dr Simon Singh, and is given in (3) below.

(3)          Citizens Advice report falls victim to libel threats

When I read the first four words in this sentence, I found myself expecting the preposition ‘in’ to be the next word.  I had parsed ‘report’ as a verb, rather than as part of a noun phrase, and so was expecting something like, ‘Citizens Advice report falls in complaints’.  I was genuinely confused when the next word I read was ‘victim’, and it took me a good few seconds to go back, reanalyse what I’d read and find an interpretation which fitted.

So, whilst garden path sentences might be interesting data to discuss in the class room, they can be genuinely occurring phenomena as well!  Always keep an eye out for interesting examples!

Comments

[Billy]

Me again. You might find this discussion interesting:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3559

Believe it or not, I did find that the first interpretation which came to my mind treated 'sex' as the subject and 'quiz' as a verb. I think it has to do with knowing something about the story and being used to headlines which begin 'police quiz. . .'

Billy

[Billy]

It's a good example and I agree it's good to see things we discuss in class popping up in real contexts. I wasn't garden-pathed by this one which makes me think about what makes it more or less likely that an individual goes in a particular direction when processing.

Billy