re: ambiugous sentences

Subject: re: ambiugous sentences
From: Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 08:49:40 -0700 (PDT)



---------------------------------------
pnewman1 -at- optonline -dot- net reported:
While doing some AI studies of parsing engines I ran across some
interesting sentences:

The horse run past the barn fell.
---------------------------------------

"The horse raced past the barn fell" is a classic example of a garden-path sentence in linguistics. These sentences demonstrate parsing and how parsing can go wrong due to listener/reader expectations and the brain's need to immediately process information. They're called garden-path sentences because the sentence leads us to believe that it will have a certain syntactic structure and meaning, then it takes a sudden turn and we end up in a place we didn't expect (I guess that's how garden paths work???).

Anyway, here are some more examples of garden path sentences:
http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/garden-path.html

As always, for anything related to liguistics, start with Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct" or "Words and Rules". Both providesa nice overview from which you can learn a lot. :-)


********************************************
Sean Hower - tech writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

"Whatever you do, do NOT let your editorial decisions be made by the squiggly spell-checking lines in Word!" ~Keith Cronin, Techwr-l irritant ;-)

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