Re: USAGE: Garden paths

Nik Taylor wrote:

> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> >   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
>
> Ah!  But there's a difference - the first two contain a "by" phrase
> (and, also, the second has a different form than if it were active -
> bitten instead of bit), and the third has no chance of ambiguity as
> "build" cannot be interpreted as intransitive.
Ambiguity is not the issue, since "The horse raced past the barn fell down" is not
ambiguous:  AFAIK, it has only one possible interpretation.


> In my idiolect, a
> relative clause is REQUIRED in certain cases, such as transitive verbs
> that may be intransitive (like race) or verbs that may take nouns or
> verb phrases as objects (like "suspect" or "believe").  So, my idiolect
> would not permit "The horse raced past the barn fell down" or another
> example I've seen "Sherlock never suspected the beautiful woman was an
> heiress" (or something to that effect).  Both of those require a
> relative pronoun in my idiolect, "The horse which was raced past the
> barn fell down", "Sherlock never suspected THAT ..."  Like I said, I use
> it more than most people, most people I know wouldn't use the relative.
> That's one thing I liked when learning Spanish is that "que/quien" is
> required in all relative clauses.
First, a minor quibble:  "that" in "Sherlock never suspected that..." is not a
relative pronoun, but a complementizer, which introduces an embedded clause that
functions as a 'direct object' of the verb.

But getting to your main point:  I suspect that your requirement that a
complementizer or relative pronoun be present in the cases you mention is not a
rule of your mental grammar, but rather a 'meta-rule' designed to avoid a potential
parsing problem.  The reason I say that is because your requirement is not
dependent on the structure of the relative clause per se, but rather on the
(accidental) morphological properties of the verb which happens to be contained
within the relative clause.  (I know of no rules of clause structure which make
explicit reference to morphological information of that kind.)  If your requirement
were a real rule of syntax, I would expect its application to be much more general.



> > 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.
>
> Well, it may be grammatical in some dialects, but I'd consider it
> hopelessly ungrammatical in MY idiolect, as I never produce that kind of
> sentence.
I never produce those kinds of sentences either.  But I fail to produce them for
parsing reasons, not because they're ruled out by the grammar.  Again, I think
you're missing my point:  Garden path sentences demonstrate that *acceptability*
and *grammaticality* are two entirely different things!  A sentence can be
unacceptable without being ungrammatical.

Matt.