5 ms·
Were the eggs found by the girl the same eggs that the organizers had hid initially?
by nyanpasu64 5y ago
Were the eggs found by the girl the same eggs that the organizers had hid initially?
- skupig 5y agoThis is a great garden-path sentence. I had to read it like, 3 times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- em-bee 5y agocurious because i can't find any alternative reading besides the question if the eggs that the girl found were the same eggs that the organizers had hidden.
- skupig 5y agoWere the eggs found by the girl [that] the... oops, parse error, try again!
- drewcoo 5y agoAgreed. Layer 8 error.
- tclancy 5y agoDon’t blame the hens!
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhile I agree that the sentence is not a garden path sentence, a garden path sentence doesn't need to have more than one reading. A garden path sentence is difficult to parse, but that doesn't mean it has more than one parsing available.
- em-bee 5y agoit doesn't need to have a correct second reading but it does need a partial misreading at least.
- MauranKilom 5y agoThe partial sentence "Were the eggs [actually] found by the girl" means something else than "Were the eggs [that were] found by the girl the same [ones as]...". Even if the semantic meaning of the words is largely unchanged, the sentence structure parses quite differently. I can confirm that this also took me for a spin when reading the comment.
- jefftk 5y agoTo be a garden path sentence at some point your parsing needs to do a substantial backtracking from the initially most likely reading. In this sentence, if you'd parsed the first seven words as "did the girl find the eggs?" you'd need to backtrack to the beginning on getting the eighth word (the).
- wodenokoto 5y agoIt took me while to find the garden path, but the girl could have been hidden by the organizers.
- alar44 5y ago???
- bbx 5y agoThank you SO MUCH for this. English isn’t my first language, and many times I’ve come across sentences like this. I’ve even been collecting them whenever I came across them, on Reddit mostly. I’ve always wanted to find out why this type of sentence only occurred in English (to my knowledge). I’ve always thought it was because a lot of words could be interpreted as either nouns, adjectives, verbs or even adverbs, while retaining the same spelling. Anyway, I’m glad I finally found the term for these sentences. Many thanks.
- em-bee 5y agothe wikipedia page has examples in other languages too. i think the grammar and vocabulary has some influence over the ability to construct such sentences. some sentences only work like that when written (like the german example) and others only when spoken. being non-native speakers has the interesting advantage that often we don't know the default interpretation of a word, because we don't always know which meaning of a word is more common. on the other hand we'll miss some because we are not even aware of the second meaning of some words.
- nightbrawler 5y agoSo many participles at play here
- nyanpasu64 5y agoOops, sorry, rereading the sentence I tripped myself up!