Path sentences garden
Garden path sentences are sentences where your initial reading is likely to be wrong, i.e. the sentence leads you down the garden path. The best known example is:
The old man the boat.
When reading this for the first time, most people understand ‘old’ to be an adjective describing ‘man’ (since the phrase ‘the old man’ is common) and then wonder where the verb has got to. It can take several attempts to realise that ‘old’ is a noun and ‘man’ is the verb in this sentence (especially since ‘man’ as a verb is quite rare).
Garden path sentences are important in psycholinguistics since they can tell us how people process sentences and in natural language processing where they are used to evaluate the effectiveness of parsing tools.
For Perplexitaal 2, I have taken 3 garden path sentences but jumbled the word order (hence, ‘path sentences garden’). Can you unscramble the words to make syntactically correct (if confusing) garden path sentences?
Sentence 1
eat fat accumulates people
Sentence 2
the the his of out who ducks hunts way man head
Sentence 3
the of staff close backroom numbers houses
Sentence 1: Fat people eat accumulates.
Sentence 2: The man who hunts the ducks out of his way.
Sentence 3: The close houses number of backroom staff.