Thursday, May 1, 2008

Garden path sentences

I love Linguistics! It's sucha bugger! :) We covered some really interesting stuff yesterday and it took me awhile to get a few of them...

Check out the following sentences.. they ARE legal sentences in English:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.

The cotton clothes are made from grows in Mississipi.

Since Keith always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.

And there are many more!!! Can you see how these senteces are actually correct? Or has your syntactic parser been led down the garden path like these sentences are supposed to do? Well, they actually aren't all that complex. Let's have a go at it together and make some sense of them!

The horse raced past the barn fell.
In clearer terms: The horse that was being raced (past the barn) fell!!

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
Also: The man who hunts (not necessarily hunts ducks!) ducks out on weekends.

The cotton clothes are made from grows in Mississipi.
Also: The cotton that clothes are made from... grows in Mississipi.

Since Keith always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.
Also: Since Keith always walks, a mile seems like a short distance to him. (Oh! The magic of the COMMA).

See the logic now? :)