> Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 21:38:39 -0400
> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> > 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'm quite aware that other people do produce
> similar sentences (altho I've never heard anything as difficult as
> "The horse raced past the barn fell down" except given as an example
> of "garden path" sentences!). I understand the concept of "garden
> path" sentences, it's just that that example isn't one in my
> idiolect, it's merely ungrammatical.
Now I'm not a native speaker of English --- but I agree that the horse
example should have at least a ?. Perhaps it's because the horse is
animate; I like parallel examples with inanimate subjects much better:
A loaf baked in a convection oven for fifty-five minutes will
be hard as stone.
I do feel that the garden path effect is nearly absent in that
sentence --- perhaps for the same reason --- but then you can use the
active meaning to surprise the listener:
A loaf baked in a convection oven for fifty-five minutes and
came out hard as stone.
It's worth to note here that the past participle takes the transitive
sense of the verbs, where the active past finite form is intransitive.
And [cue an old discussion] the relation between the two meanings is
different for the two verbs; transitive race is a sort of causative,
and intransitive bake is a sort of passive.
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)