Friday 4 July 2014
A garden path
sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way
that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is
lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end. Garden path sentences are
used in psycholinguistics to illustrate the fact that when human beings read,
they process language one word at a time. "Garden path" refers to the
saying "to be led down the garden path", meaning "to be
misled". Garden-variety garden path sentences are examples of paraprosdokian,
where the latter part of an utterance or discourse is unexpected and causes the
reader or listener to have to think about what he previously heard in a new
light. A common example is a pun employing antanaclasis: a word or phrase
appears; it then reappears and is (at first) understood as a grammatical or rhetorical
parallel to what had gone before; however, the rest
of the sentence makes it clear that the second use must be different from the
first. Source
