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I wonder if there are any studies that have looked at newspaper headlines, or tv news summary crawls, which use abbreviated language that are conducive to G-p s'es. A lot of times they are so abbreviated (like no verb) that they are not sentences at all, so not applicable here; but sometimes they are. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine currently in the news, CNN had the following headline-style large subtitle on screen before anyone spoke it, and when reading it, I had that "back-tracking moment" so characteristic of G-p s:
This is actually a grammatical sentence, and does have characteristics of a G-p s; the problem is, we can't add it without a secondary source that talks about it. But that's what I'm wondering about, if there are such sources. Anyway, I'll be keeping a lookout for it now. Mathglot ( talk) 17:38, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Is this headline even defensible? I came to this article trying to understand its origin. An accepted authority (Fowler) is cited calling it a "False Trail" sentence not the chosen headline. Why is it not called that? Why are there zero cites / references for "Garden Path Sentence"? It comes across as a pet phrase being used at the expense of the much clearer and accepted standard phrase. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.224.227.214 ( talk) 13:06, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
Wouldn't the following be clearer? The old people/sailors are those who man the boat -- Backinstadiums ( talk) 15:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten (awkwardly) as "The girl hit by the boy who was bitten by the dog cried", creates a parsing problem that requires the reader to keep track of multiple verb/object pairs. This is similar to the way a computer compiler program keeps track of context as it parses a program text, typically using an internal stack to keep track of the individual grammar constructs as they are recognized. The problem with this particular sentence is that most people are not used to keeping track of more than two verb/object constructs at a time (a stacking depth of two), while this sentence contains three nested levels of pairs.
Similarly, parsing a garden-path sentence requires keeping track of the grammatical constructs as they are recognized in a left-to-right parsing scan, the difference here being that one of recognized constructs is based on a misinterpretation of a word, such as taking a word to be a noun when it is actually a verb, leading to an incorrectly recognized construct. At some point further along in the parse, the error become apparent, which requires backtracking the parse, popping the stack one or more levels, and restarting the scan using a different interpretation for the problem word. — Loadmaster ( talk) 15:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@ Mathglot: I'm German and your interpretation of the sentence is wrong. "vor allem" is "especially", but that has nothing to do with the meaning of "werden", which is indicating the future. You could interpret that as an exhibition in the future, but then you would say "Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen sein", which doesn't work with the garden-path sentence idea any more. As written and if we read "Modern" as "modern" then the first part of the sentence tells us that the frames are becoming modern, just like it's actually telling us that they are becoming mouldy. -- mfb ( talk) 08:17, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
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Garden-path sentence article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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I wonder if there are any studies that have looked at newspaper headlines, or tv news summary crawls, which use abbreviated language that are conducive to G-p s'es. A lot of times they are so abbreviated (like no verb) that they are not sentences at all, so not applicable here; but sometimes they are. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine currently in the news, CNN had the following headline-style large subtitle on screen before anyone spoke it, and when reading it, I had that "back-tracking moment" so characteristic of G-p s:
This is actually a grammatical sentence, and does have characteristics of a G-p s; the problem is, we can't add it without a secondary source that talks about it. But that's what I'm wondering about, if there are such sources. Anyway, I'll be keeping a lookout for it now. Mathglot ( talk) 17:38, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Is this headline even defensible? I came to this article trying to understand its origin. An accepted authority (Fowler) is cited calling it a "False Trail" sentence not the chosen headline. Why is it not called that? Why are there zero cites / references for "Garden Path Sentence"? It comes across as a pet phrase being used at the expense of the much clearer and accepted standard phrase. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.224.227.214 ( talk) 13:06, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
Wouldn't the following be clearer? The old people/sailors are those who man the boat -- Backinstadiums ( talk) 15:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten (awkwardly) as "The girl hit by the boy who was bitten by the dog cried", creates a parsing problem that requires the reader to keep track of multiple verb/object pairs. This is similar to the way a computer compiler program keeps track of context as it parses a program text, typically using an internal stack to keep track of the individual grammar constructs as they are recognized. The problem with this particular sentence is that most people are not used to keeping track of more than two verb/object constructs at a time (a stacking depth of two), while this sentence contains three nested levels of pairs.
Similarly, parsing a garden-path sentence requires keeping track of the grammatical constructs as they are recognized in a left-to-right parsing scan, the difference here being that one of recognized constructs is based on a misinterpretation of a word, such as taking a word to be a noun when it is actually a verb, leading to an incorrectly recognized construct. At some point further along in the parse, the error become apparent, which requires backtracking the parse, popping the stack one or more levels, and restarting the scan using a different interpretation for the problem word. — Loadmaster ( talk) 15:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@ Mathglot: I'm German and your interpretation of the sentence is wrong. "vor allem" is "especially", but that has nothing to do with the meaning of "werden", which is indicating the future. You could interpret that as an exhibition in the future, but then you would say "Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen sein", which doesn't work with the garden-path sentence idea any more. As written and if we read "Modern" as "modern" then the first part of the sentence tells us that the frames are becoming modern, just like it's actually telling us that they are becoming mouldy. -- mfb ( talk) 08:17, 6 March 2024 (UTC)