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Concept
Garden-path sentence
Summary
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. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".
Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing. Though these sentences are grammatically correct, such sentences are syntactically non-standard (or incorrect) as evidenced by the need for re-reading and careful parsing. Garden path sentences are not usually desirable in writing that intends to communicate clearly.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana
This is a common example that has been the subject of psycholinguistic research and has been used to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence efforts. The difficulty in correctly parsing the sentence results from the fact that readers tend to interpret old as an adjective. Reading the, they expect a noun or an adjective to follow, and when they then read old followed by man they assume that the phrase the old man is to be interpreted as determiner – adjective – noun. When readers encounter another the following the supposed noun man (rather than the expected verb, as in e.g. The old man washed the boat), they are forced to re-analyze the sentence.
Official source
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