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This title was close to being a garden path sentence, but ultimately avoided it.
by windowshopping 1y ago
This title was close to being a garden path sentence, but ultimately avoided it.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoTell more about garden paths in this context, I'm curious!
- xoxxala 1y agoI had no idea what a garden path sentence was, too, but wiki to the rescue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- oatsandsugar 1y agoThe old man the boat
- sshine 1y agoTime flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
- chutes 1y agoThe horse raced past the barn fell
- alt227 1y agoI still have never managed to understand that one properly
- cpach 1y agoI think it shall be interpreted like this: The creature who fell was the horse (that was previously raced past the barn). I.e. it was not the barn that fell.
- alt227 1y agoThankyou that makes sense! So in reality this is just an incorrect sentence. It should be written as "The horse that raced past the barn fell"
- cpach 1y agoIt’s ambigous, but is it incorrect?
- alt227 1y agoIf language is constantly changing due to how people use it rather than sticking to a strict set of rules, then in my opinion gramatically correct sentences should always be explicit and never ambiguous.
- sshine 1y agoIt should be. But it’s not incorrect to say The tree grown tall is the one I planted The horse raced past had somewhere to go But when you don’t end the subject syntagma in an obvious way, you make it difficult to read. It’s easier to read The tree grown tall last year withered because grown has a distinct past particle form. The past particle of raced is raced, which means you need more lookahead to determine its role in the sentence. You can artificially push out the point at which the sentence disambiguates between whether the word is past tense or past particle, and make it seem that it’s probably past tense until it can’t be. You could say that the sentence is LL(k) for an unintuitively high k.
- impish9208 1y agoYes, daemonized children must always be killed; preferably by the parent, but any reaper would also work.
- oatsandsugar 1y agoIs that a forking path sentence? If so, whoosh.
- alt227 1y agoI have never undestood why garden path sentences are interesting. They can always be rewritten to make more obvious sense. Its like saying theres a way to take any sentence and remove some words to make its intended meaning confusing. I dont personally find this interesting, just frustrating that the author didnt take more time to use punctuation or more words to convey explicit meaning.