Talk:Garden-path sentence

Headline usage

I wonder if there are any studies that have looked at newspaper headlines, or tv news summary crawls, which use abbreviated language that are conducive to G-p s'es. A lot of times they are so abbreviated (like no verb) that they are not sentences at all, so not applicable here; but sometimes they are. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine currently in the news, CNN had the following headline-style large subtitle on screen before anyone spoke it, and when reading it, I had that "back-tracking moment" so characteristic of G-p s:

• "Rocket strikes rock Kharkiv."

This is actually a grammatical sentence, and does have characteristics of a G-p s; the problem is, we can't add it without a secondary source that talks about it. But that's what I'm wondering about, if there are such sources. Anyway, I'll be keeping a lookout for it now. Mathglot (talk) 17:38, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

We have some discussion at Headline#Headlinese, but the constraints and artificiality of the specialized headline format make it almost trivial to produce quasi-garden-path effects. If that headline were a sentence of ordinary prose, it would more likely be phrased as "Rocket strikes are rocking Kharkiv"... AnonMoos (talk) 18:10, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Is this headline even defensible? I came to this article trying to understand its origin. An accepted authority (Fowler) is cited calling it a "False Trail" sentence not the chosen headline. Why is it not called that? Why are there zero cites / references for "Garden Path Sentence"? It comes across as a pet phrase being used at the expense of the much clearer and accepted standard phrase. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.224.227.214 (talk) 13:06, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

The old are those who man the boat

Wouldn't the following be clearer? The old people/sailors are those who man the boat --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

The main interest of Garden-path sentences is not really how to rephrase them so as to be more unambiguous or stylistically-acceptable, but what they may reveal about human language processing... AnonMoos (talk) 18:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Context stacking

Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten (awkwardly) as "The girl hit by the boy who was bitten by the dog cried", creates a parsing problem that requires the reader to keep track of multiple verb/object pairs. This is similar to the way a computer compiler program keeps track of context as it parses a program text, typically using an internal stack to keep track of the individual grammar constructs as they are recognized. The problem with this particular sentence is that most people are not used to keeping track of more than two verb/object constructs at a time (a stacking depth of two), while this sentence contains three nested levels of pairs.

Similarly, parsing a garden-path sentence requires keeping track of the grammatical constructs as they are recognized in a left-to-right parsing scan, the difference here being that one of recognized constructs is based on a misinterpretation of a word, such as taking a word to be a noun when it is actually a verb, leading to an incorrectly recognized construct. At some point further along in the parse, the error become apparent, which requires backtracking the parse, popping the stack one or more levels, and restarting the scan using a different interpretation for the problem word. — Loadmaster (talk) 15:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Illustrating the difficulty, your paraphrase forgot a verb. —Tamfang (talk) 04:39, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Corrected (above). — Loadmaster (talk) 23:04, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

German example

@Mathglot: I'm German and your interpretation of the sentence is wrong. "vor allem" is "especially", but that has nothing to do with the meaning of "werden", which is indicating the future. You could interpret that as an exhibition in the future, but then you would say "Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen sein", which doesn't work with the garden-path sentence idea any more. As written and if we read "Modern" as "modern" then the first part of the sentence tells us that the frames are becoming modern, just like it's actually telling us that they are becoming mouldy. --mfb (talk) 08:17, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Far be it from me to argue with a native speaker, but your quibble isn't with me, it's with the German editors who added it to Holzwegeffekt in 2016; or maybe better said, with the authors of the 2008 article in Die Presse. If you find a source that debunks Die Presse, or if you take it up with editors at de-wiki and get consensus there that your interpretation is correct, I won't object to you or anyone making the change; but until then, it's just your original interpretation and cannot overturn sourced content. mfG, Mathglot (talk) 08:34, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

The source doesn't provide any interpretation of the discussed part of the sentence, neither does the German article in its 2016 edit or today (I didn't check every version in between). The incorrect interpretation of the sentence was added by you, without any prior work to rely on. So currently it's your original interpretation vs. the original interpretation of a native speaker. --mfb (talk) 08:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Your original interpretation is that it makes no sense, but Die Presse raised it, and German editors took the example so they both thought it made sense as a garden-path sentence. The translation (by this native speaker of English) renders the sense of it as best as one can in English; translation is not an exact science (traduttore, traditore). In my opinion, adding "becoming" to it doesn't render the original intent at all and as you pointed out in your edit summary, would render the example absurd. Yet it was real enough for a German article to cover it. If you think you can do better in the English, go for it; but if you add becoming to your version of it, then I would agree with your original comment that it is absurd, and perhaps it would be better to remove the German example entirely in that case rather than leave nonsensical content in the article. Would be a shame, as it seems to have a reliable enough source, and I fail to see the problem with it that you do. Mathglot (talk) 09:26, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Please don't misrepresent my comments. The sentence in German is fine as an example because you start interpreting "Modern" with the wrong meaning. I never wanted to change anything there. I want to fix a mistake in your translation. If you prefer removing the translations completely over fixing that mistake, then maybe you should remove them. --mfb (talk) 11:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

WP:SOFIXIT. Maybe I did misunderstand your comment, and if you think "making the first interpretation even more absurd" is an improvement then go for it. Or take it out completely. Mathglot (talk) 17:04, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I fixed it but then you reverted me. --mfb (talk) 17:21, 6 March 2024 (UTC)