Saturday, December 25, 2010

Garden path sentence

Garden path sentence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Have you ever heard of a Garden Path Sentence? Well, neither had I, till i found this wikipedia site while stumbling along on the web. Turns out, a Garden Path Sentence is a sentence that starts very normally but takes a very unexpected turn. For example, consider the sentence, "The old man the boat." At first glance the subject seems to be "The old man," but if that were the case, the sentence does not make any sense. So then how does one go about making head or tail of this sentence. What if the subject of the sentence was just "the old?" Then it makes sense, right? The old (the old people) man the boat. Makes sense? There are plenty of examples of these sentences and wikipedia does a good job of explaining the details if you wanna know more. Check it out.
Oh by the way, the reason its called a Garden Path sentence is because it leads people down the "garden path" or misleads them. Weird.

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