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 10:00:02 -0700 (PDT)



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David Cooper wrote:
ooooooooooohhhhhhhhh, careful Sean! Never tug at a linguistics thread on
this list...it's like standing up in the middle of church and saying "Come on, am I REALLY supposed to believe this?"
-------------------------------

DO NOT CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF THE LINGUISTIC GODS BWAH HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA.

Oh, sorry, don't know what came over me. tee-hee. :-)

To explain a little further:
The idea in a sentence like "The horse raced past the barn fell" is that while you're listening to/reading the sentence, your brain parces it like this:

((The horse) + ((raced) + (past the barn))).

Your brain assumes that this is the sentence you are going to be hearing, so it parses the sentence as such. Then, you get to "fell" and your brain goes...uh? Wait. And it has to reparce the sentence so that it makes sense. The sentence, as it stands, is ambiguous because it tricks the parcer. It should really be parsed something like this:

(((The horse) + (raced past the barn)) + (fell)).

Inserting "that was" clears up the ambiguity because it changes how your
brain parces the sentence right from the set-out. Your brain doesn't assume "raced" is the central action of the sentence, like it does when you don't use "that was." Insterting "that was" would yield:

(((The horse) + (that was raced past the barn)) + (fell))

Drat, I wish I could draw the tree diagram to show how "The horse raced past the barn" "The horse raced past the barn fell" and "The horse that was raced past the barn fell" are parced.

Granted, not all garden path sentences are ambigious in the same ways to
everyone. As always, we're dealing with generalities, so individual results will vary. That's why Bonnie Granat doesn't see the ambiguity. It took _me_ a bit to figure out what the sentence meant when I first encountered it. But some of the garden-path sentences listed in that link didn't bother me at all.

The point of this isn't to show grammaticality (but it is, strictly speaking, a grammatical sentence). The point is to demonstrate how our brains can make mistakes with language.


********************************************
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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