Sentences that lead you up the Garden Path

NOTE: If you're here because you tried the quiz and didn't understand it, then read on. If you haven't taken the quiz, then you might want to scroll to the end and have a go at it first.

Ever heard of a 'garden path' sentence? These are sentences that can conform to two rules of sentence structure at once, well at least to begin with. They're linguistically challenging because they represent the types of structures we don't often see in print (or hear often), so when we encounter them, they tend to trick our brains.

For example, when we read the sentence The man sat at the table, we see a complete sentence, and so we should; it is complete. So when we see this sentence The man sat at the table laughed our instinct is to disregard the final word, laughed, because it seems like a mistake, an incorrect addition. However, both these sentences are complete and correct. Here's why:

The first sentence is SVA. This is a very common structure. It stands for Subject Verb Adverbial, and basically translates to: something, or someone, did something somewhere. This structure is so common, and our brains process this structure so often, that we prefer it. The same can be said for many other structures, including structures like SVO and SVC (Subject Verb Object: The man kicked the ball; and Subject Verb Complement: The girl is happy). What they have in common is a Subject that comes first, followed by a verb that specifies what the subject is being or doing.

This is why the sentence The man sat at the table laughed seems so wrong; because we feel that sat (past tense) is the main verb in the sentence, and at the table is where he is doing the main verb, the 'sitting' (SVA). But really, what we have here is a slightly different structure. It is the the interpretation of the role of that first verb that throws us.

It's an SV structure, this is Subject Verb of course, which is: something, or someone, doing something. In grammar, it's really no different to something like The dog ran, or The man snored, except in this case the first verb in the sentence The man sat at the table laughed is to be interpreted as The man who was sitting at the table laughed. Oh course, not all past tense verbs can be used this way, and using sat in this way is not common. This is why it can be confusing even if the usage is acceptable.

In our garden path sentence, the subject consists of a noun (The man) and what we call a post-modifying phrase (sat at the table). Here the verb is part of that post-modifying phrases and not the main verb at all. Post-modifiers do the same sort of job that pre-modifiers do; they give us more information about the noun. They describe it, or specify its features.

Pre-modifiers can be adjectives (The happy man), and are called pre-modifiers because the extra information comes before the main noun, hence 'pre'. Post-modifiers do the describing after the main noun, hence 'post'. The post-modifier can specify the noun with prepositions (The man with the smile on his face), or by using verbs (The man looking in the mirror). The later example is what we have in our sentence The man sat at the table laughed; it is specifying that the man who laughed was the one who was 'sat' at the table. Thus, the sentence is complete.

Imagine you were in a restaurant where someone laughed; you ask your friend who laughed?, then you get your answer, The man sat at the table laughed. Having this context would make that sentence much easier for you to parse (process).

These sentence types make us believe they are saying one thing when in fact they are saying something quite different. When we parse sentences that we hear or read, we tend to make calculated guesses about what they mean. When we are listening to people speak, we have more information to make these predictions. Not only do we use what we know about sentences, but we use what we know about the tone of the speakers voice, the stress patterns (prosody) of their speech, their mood, the topic being discussed, what was said before and after, the place or context of the conversation and so on. When reading a single sentence, all we really have is our knowledge of structure and we miss all the other stuff. This sometimes makes interpreting written sentences harder. When this happens, we rely on our knowledge of the most commonly used structures, and this is why we can so easily be led up the garden path.

So there you have it. Try the quiz again and see if you can spot the garden path sentences this time.

Good luck!