Ambiguity and garden path sentences

Ambiguity and garden path sentences.

The name "garden path sentence" originates from the saying "to be led up the garden path", or "to be misled". Simply put, garden path sentences are sentences in which the reader's intuitive response is usually contrary to the intended meaning of the sentence, due to initial ambiguity and duality in the usage and meanings of some of the words.

An example of a garden path sentences would be the title of this blog "The old man boats". In this case, the word "man" is usually intuitively parsed as a noun, in part due to the adjective "old" preceding it, which forms the common noun phrase "old man". However, upon seeing the word boats, the mind realises that there cannot be two nouns ("man" and "boats") appearing consecutively in a sentence, and therefore one of them has to be otherwise. In this case, contrary to initial examination, "old" is a noun (rather than an adjective), whilst "man" is a verb (rather than a noun). The above sentence is in fact a simple sentence with the structure of subject-verb-object, however, due to the duality in the parts of speech regarding which "old" and "man" can be parsed, whilst at the same time ignoring the duality in the part of speech of "boats" (in this case a noun rather than a verb), the mind has to simultaneously parse 3 dual meanings (in terms of parts of speech), to find the 1 out of 6 permutations which actually makes sense.

Garden path sentences may prove, firstly, that initial parsing of sentences is dependent on frequency of personal experiences, and secondly, that parsing of sentences occurs upon the hearing of each word.

Firstly, I feel that the reason that the mind processes "old man" as a noun phrase rather than "old" and "man" as a noun and verb respectively, is simply due to the frequency in which they occur in everyday speech. "Old" rarely exists as a noun, but rather, as an adjective which forms a noun phrase, in the cases of "old people", or, indeed, "old man". "Man" as a verb is also rarely used in everyday conversation, taking charge of boats apparently not a very popular conversation topic. As such, the mind immediately parses "old man" as one noun phrase, rather than a noun and a verb separately, despite the latter being the supposedly more "simple" form of a sentence.

Secondly, I feel that another reason that the mind processes "old man" as a noun phrase is due to the fact that the mind intuitively tries to connect one word to the previous or the next when parsing sentences. Upon hearing the word "old", the mind would have intuitively tried to associate the next word with it. If the word had been, say, "run", the mind would have taken "run" as a verb, because "old run" as a noun phrase makes no semantic sense. On the contrary, with the word "man" processed immediately after the mention of the word "old", the mind would have attempted to connect the two, discovered a logical link and sense in the meaning of the noun phrase formed, thus parsing it as "old man" (although no doubt also helped by this noun phrase's frequent usage in everyday conversation). As such, I feel that this shows that human beings do, in fact, process information one word at a time, always attempting to find a logical relationship between the two which, in the case of garden path sentences, may prove to be wrong.

Therefore, I feel that garden path sentences and the ambiguity they bring serve to show many things about the human mind when it comes to the parsing of sentences.