Garden-path sentence

· from English

What is a garden-path sentence?

A garden-path sentence is grammatical but leads the reader into a wrong interpretation first, forcing a reread, like The old man the boat.

Readers parse sentences word by word and commit early to the likeliest structure; garden-path sentences exploit that. Psycholinguists use them to study how the brain processes language. Mandarin and Japanese have their own versions, often built on ambiguous word boundaries.

Examples

The old man the boat; The horse raced past the barn fell; 下雨天留客天留我不留 xiàyǔ tiān liú kè tiān liú wǒ bù liú (a rainy day keeps guests; heaven keeps me, you do not / punctuation changes the meaning)

Kungfucius says: The sentence was fine. Your brain jumped to conclusions.