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Garden path sentence
- dandare 11y agoAs a non native speaker I struggled greatly until I learned that this is a thing in English language.
- function_seven 11y agoHa, yup. I think a good corollary is prefix vs. infix notation in programing languages. With prefix (or RPN) notation, it's impossible to be led down the garden path. The rules are simple and unambiguous. For example, 4+5×3 is a garden path, where reading left-to-right you may think to yourself, "four plus five is nine, then nine times... wait, I have to backtrack and handle five times three first..." Whereas + 4 × 5 3 can't be confused. (Or 4 5 3 × + in RPN) I'm not a (good) speaker of any other language than English, but I can see how adjective/verb/noun ordering in different languages can prevent this problem.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoRPN does have the advantage that it's unambiguous, yes, but if you miss a token you will end up confused.
- jjnoakes 11y agoWon't you be confused if you miss a token in a non-RPN parse?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYes, but the difference is less drastic.
- jloughry 11y agoAnd this sentence: The girl the boy the dog hit bit cried. measures the depth of the stack in human brains.
- mikeash 11y agoI think I've suffered an overflow, and I bet it's exploitable too.
- function_seven 11y agoYeah, it exceeded my own stack :). Is it, "The boy hit the dog, the dog then bit the girl, who then cried?" Some of those verbs are binary operators (transitive), others are unary (intransitive).
- jloughry 11y agoArgh! You're right; I got the words out of order. It should be: The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried. I tried parenthesising it; I tried Lisp syntax (you're right; it's the mix of direct and indirect objects that complicates things); nothing worked. It's a diabolical sentence. The best I could come up with was this: In step 1, the dog bit the boy. In step 2, the boy hit the girl. In step 3, the girl cried.
- unhammer 11y agoother languages have them as well: https://www.quora.com/Are-garden-path-sentences-possible-in-languages-other-than-English?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Are-garden-path-sentences-possible-in-... (though wikipedia claims[citation needed] it mostly affects analytic languages)
- Someone 11y agoAlso, the Wikipedia page links to German (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzwegeffekt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzwegeffekt) and Dutch (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuinzin https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuinzin) versions. The details of the grammar of the languages makes the methods one can use to achieve the initially ambiguous parse different, though.
- wodenokoto 11y agoIt's a thing in all languages.
- jobigoud 11y agoIt seems to me that English is more prone to it due to the easiness of turning nouns into verbs (as opposed to French for example).
- tmalsburg2 11y agoTo say that it exists in all languages is perhaps a bit strong, but, yes, most do. However, there are difference in the degree to which ambiguities occur. German, for example, has many morphological cues that allow the comprehender to rule out alternative interpretations. The price is that German tends to be slightly more verbose.
- foxhedgehog 11y agoShakespeare loves to do this: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer..."
- kccqzy 11y agoI don't think that's an example of a garden path sentence though. My initial parse is "whether or not suffering in the mind is nobler". "In the mind" is an adverbial phrase that modifies "to suffer". Am I missing anything?
- foxhedgehog 11y ago"Is nobler" turns out to modify "in the mind."
- petercooper 11y agoMaybe I've misunderstood all this time, but I thought "in the mind" meant to think about suffering, not literally suffer in the mind. That is to say, more like "whether or not one thinks suffering is nobler".
- willvarfar 11y agoThe name "garden path" reminds me that during my Turbo Pascal loving 80s I played with making “fog” from markov chains. The idea was to computer-generate reasonable-reading nonsense text and I'm sure you've all tried it as kids too! :) Of course my naive approach suffered from lack of corpus; if it picked a rare word, it’d get railroaded into using the very limited set of words that follow that rare word and so on. I remember running it - this was before the internet days, so I can’t imagine where I got the input text from - and getting back a page-full of gobbledygook. And there right in the middle, somehow drawing the eye like a magnet, was one of those railroaded sentences: herbaceous Well when your random roulette picks the word herbaceous, its likely only seen it once or so in its learning text, so there aren’t so many words it can pick next: herbaceous border So far so good. But where does this lead next? herbaceous border disputes Love it!
- Swizec 11y agoI could swear you've posted this exact comment before. Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-spam-posts-on-a-forum-i-keep-an-eye-on-are http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparing_automatic_poetry_generators/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...? https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_trainergenerator_in_29_sloc_of/?sort=qa https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra... http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-have http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99... But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste? I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.
- willvarfar 11y agoYeap, all me. Its one of my fondest recollections of early programming. :) So sorry it offends you.
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- Tobold 11y agoThat's the first time I understood "fruit flies like a banana" as a pun -.- To be fair, I'm not a native speaker.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt ahem flies past many native speakers initially
- Kenp77 11y agoThis is awesome!
- Tomte 11y agoI think in real-world situations speakers would prefer "fruit flies like bananas", which may also be a garden path sentence, but its resolution seems much easier to me. Do native speakers concur? Is there any research whether speakers do prefer utterances like my example in practice due to this property?
- zodiac 11y agoIn real-world situations the stress falls on different words depending on which parse of "fruit flies like a banana" you are adopting
- Stratoscope 11y agoI would love to see a garden path sentence at the beginning of this Wikipedia article. The second sentence, in a paragraph of its own, would explain what just happened. I doubt this would ever get past the serious folks at the 'pedia. But if it did... That would be the difference between awesome and mundane.
- lmm 11y agoMaybe tvtropes will have a page on it; they seem like the heirs to the awesome fun place wikipedia used to be.
- berkes 11y agoThe sidebar shows two other languages for this Lemma, the Dutch one is interesting: * Intuinzinnen, From the Dutch proverbs "ergens intuinen" of "om de tuin geleid worden". Literally: To "be gardened into something", or "to be led around the garden." Both meaning the same as "lead someone down the garden path" Seams the proverb is nearly similar in both languages. Which makes me wonder whether they originated from the same word. After all, Dutch and English (And German, Danish and Swedish) have the same common ancestor. Or whether they describe the same, in the past generally known effect of garden paths leading to unexpected dead ends.
- Someone 11y agoNo. 'tuin' etymologically is 'town'. Both originally described an enclosure (around a piece of ground). From there, it became the piece of ground within in both languages (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=town http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=town) Garden is from French (jardin) Back to the proverb: the dutch one seems to be about "keeping someone from that what is important/the truth" by not letting them in.
- mpclark 11y ago"the poor aerodynamic properties of bananas [citation needed]" Worth reading just for that little bit of precision.
- zxcdw 11y agoNot to nitpick, but yet another partial quote. Bravo.
- Natanael_L 11y agoSounds like human sentence parsing is better fit for handling predefined definitions and additive sentence building, and isn't fit for recursion.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoNah, this just means that language did not evolve to be written. In spoken language, these ambiguities are not a problem because of prosodic cues. Also, non-recursive languages are not necessarily unambiguous, which shows that this problem is not tied to recursion.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoI find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example, The horse raced past the barn fell should never be written like that. The fix is: The horse, raced past the barn, fell But: The old man the boat really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.
- PuffinBlue 11y agoI concur about the grammatical fixes. As a native British English speaker I didn't actually have any trouble parsing any of the sentences save for the "The horse raced past the barn fell" because it was written without the customary punctuational scaffolding. 'The old man the boat' seemed fine to me too, not sure why. I'd be interested to hear if other British English folks had much trouble with these sentences. Perhaps it's a by product of being exposed to too many 'dad jokes' (Fruit flies like a banana) but perhaps it's a more general condition of British English humour that made me feel familiar with this type of sentence structure.
- ghayes 11y agoSure, though a substantive adjective followed by a noun-verb homonym will almost always cause this phenomenon (to varying degrees): The crooked defect home. The hot lead the cold. The quick pace themselves. The wet tear off their wet clothes.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoNice examples. "Old man" is a much more common adjective/noun construct than "wet tear", "crooked defect", and maybe even "quick pace", though, so I think these are slightly easier to parse. But "hot lead" is excellent :-)
- JadeNB 11y agoI don't know whether "the hot lead the cold" and "the wet tear off their clothes" are made easier, or harder, to parse by the fact that when one (or at least I) reads them, one assigns a pronunciation to the 3rd word en passant. (I picked correctly, as it turned out, so don't know how hard it is to overcome the effect of a wrong choice.)
- Xophmeister 11y agoA similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically) infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and "which"). So you get unparsable things like: The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked. ...punctuated and complementised makes it slightly better: The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked. ...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics subtly but significantly: The mouse feared the cat, who loathed the dog who barked. I say "technically" because there's nothing stopping you from doing this, but in reality, even one level of embedding can be borderline nonsensical (e.g., the "The horse raced past the barn fell" example).
- colanderman 11y agoThe dog, who was loathed by the cat whom the mouse feared, barked. Unwound and same meaning as your first and second sentences. Or even simpler: The dog, who was loathed by the cat who was feared by the rat, barked. Come to think of it, this reminds me somewhat of tail-recursion optimization.
- Jabbles 11y agoYou can't "technically" do that. Which "rule" (from which rulebook) do you think allows you to arbitrarily repeat structures?
- Xophmeister 11y agoThere's no rulebook when it comes to syntax (grammar), unless you're a prescriptivist. There is plenty of precedent for embedding subclauses (e.g., "Here is a sentence, that I just made up, which has an embedded subclause."), but -- beyond anecdotal data -- there is no hard cut-off point to how many times you are permitted to embed. Empirically, most people don't like more than one level, but plenty of people allow it; thus it becomes more a function of cerebral load than it does an argument of permitted structures.
- morgante 11y agoIf you're arguing over technicalities, you are inherently adopting a prescriptivist approach. There are two possible approaches to your sentence and neither renders it grammatically correct. A prescriptivist would dismiss it as not being allowed by any rules while a descriptivist would point out that it defies both common usage and intelligibility.
- rikkus 11y agoAfter I read the article self-destructed!