Re: USAGE: Garden paths

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:

> dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >
> > > J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> > > >   "We raced the horse past the barn"
> > > >   "The horse was raced past the barn"
> > > >   "The horse [raced past the barn] fell down"
> > >
> > > Yes, but there'd be commas "The horse, raced past the barn, fell down",
> > > which prevents the ambiguity.  Even so, it's still questionable in my
> > > idiolect, but then again, I tend to use the relative pronouns alot more
> > > than most people.
> >
> > No, there would only be commas if the relative clause were an
> > unrestricted relative clause; in Matt's example, it is a restricted
> > relative and requires no commas.
Exactly!  Consider:  "The horse raced past the barn fell down, but the horse
left in the stables remained standing."


> Well, perhaps this just illustrates a difference in Nik's and my
> idiolects and Matt's and yours.
I find it hard to believe that you and Nik don't allow reduced relatives with
past participles in them.  Do you mean to say that you consider sentences like
the following to be ungrammatical?

  The poll [conducted by CNN] was inconclusive
  The man [bitten on the leg by a snake] died of his wound
  Houses [built at the turn of the century] are not up to code

Anyway, I think you're missing the point.  Nobody is arguing that garden path
sentences sound natural.  Quite the contrary: there's clearly something wrong
with them.  It's just that whatever is wrong with them has nothing to do with
grammaticality.

Garden path constructions illustrate the fact that you can have a sentence
which fails to violate any known principles of syntax, and which is completely
unambiguous, but which is nevertheless judged marginal or unacceptable on the
grounds that it is hopelessly difficult to parse.  Since "raced" may be either
transitive or intransitive, and since it has the same form whether it's a past
tense verb or a participle, and since there's no relative pronoun or
complementizer to tell you that "raced" is part of a relative clause, the
speaker's natural tendency is to interpret "raced" as the main clause verb (as
in "The horse raced down the hill").  Having failed to detect the beginning of
the relative clause, the speaker is sent down a 'garden path'.  As a result,
the parsing mechanism 'breaks down', and the speaker ends up interpreting the
sentence as gibberish, even though--from a grammatical perspective--it's
perfectly well-formed.

Another example of the effect of parsing on acceptability judgements is
centre-embedding.  Sentences which contain more than one level of
centre-embedding are routinely rejected by English speakers, even though
there's no principle of grammar which rules them out:

  The cheese [that the rat [that the cat chased] ate] was moldy.

Matt.