Talk:Garden-path sentence: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 15:58, 22 October 2023

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Garden-path sentence article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1: 45 days

Please add {{WikiProject banner shell}} to this page and add the quality rating to that template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Linguistics: Applied Linguistics Start‑class

	Linguistics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics articles
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Applied Linguistics Task Force.

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 9 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Luccamagalhaes. Peer reviewers: SillyCrumb.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2019 and 11 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Zherfkens.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Headline usage

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:

"Rocket strikes rock Kharkiv."

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)[reply]

We have some discussion at Headline#Headlinese, but the constraints and artificiality of the specialized headline format make it almost trivial to produce quasi-garden-path effects. If that headline were a sentence of ordinary prose, it would more likely be phrased as "Rocket strikes are rocking Kharkiv"... AnonMoos (talk) 18:10, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

The old are those who man the boat

Wouldn't the following be clearer? The old people/sailors are those who man the boat --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The main interest of Garden-path sentences is not really how to rephrase them so as to be more unambiguous or stylistically-acceptable, but what they may reveal about human language processing... AnonMoos (talk) 18:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Context stacking

Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten as "The girl whom the boy that 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)[reply]

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 :The main interest of Garden-path sentences is not really how to rephrase them so as to be more unambiguous or stylistically-acceptable, but what they may reveal about human language processing... [[User:AnonMoos|AnonMoos]] ([[User talk:AnonMoos|talk]]) 18:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
+== Context stacking ==
+Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten as "The girl whom the boy that 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 [[Pushdown automaton|parses]] a program text, typically using an internal [[Stack (abstract data type)|stack]] to keep track of the individual [[Formal grammar|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. —&nbsp;[[User:Loadmaster|Loadmaster]] ([[User talk:Loadmaster|talk]]) 15:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)