See garden path sentence in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for garden path sentence meaning in English (4.8kB)
{
"etymology_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "lead someone up the garden path",
"3": "lead someone up (or down) the garden path"
},
"expansion": "lead someone up (or down) the garden path",
"name": "m"
}
],
"etymology_text": "From the idiom lead someone up (or down) the garden path, because readers form an interpretation of the sentence which remains plausible until near the end of the sentence, at which point the readers realize that their interpretation cannot be right (they have been led up a garden path) and they must try another interpretation.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "garden path sentences",
"tags": [
"plural"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"head": "garden path sentence"
},
"expansion": "garden path sentence (plural garden path sentences)",
"name": "en-noun"
}
],
"hyphenation": [
"gar‧den"
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "noun",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "topical",
"langcode": "en",
"name": "Linguistics",
"orig": "en:Linguistics",
"parents": [
"Language",
"Social sciences",
"Communication",
"Sciences",
"Society",
"All topics",
"Fundamental"
],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1995, Reiko Mazuka, Kenji Itoh, “Can Japanese Speakers be Led down the Garden Path?”, in Reiko Mazuka, Noriko Nagai, editors, Japanese Sentence Processing, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pages 295–296",
"text": "Whether a particular construction causes a garden-path effect depends on the specific grammar of the language. For example, the famous example of an English garden-path sentence in (1) [\"The horse raced past the barn fell\"] would not exist if the past tense form of the verb race were not identical to the reduced relative form, the former of which is the preferred reading for this sentence.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005, Michael W[illiam] Eysenck, Mark T. Keane, “Language Comprehension”, in Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook, 5th edition, Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, page 362, column 1",
"text": "One of the functions of punctuation is to reduce any ambiguity, and readers are less confused by garden-path sentences that are punctuated than by those that are not[…].",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2008, David W. Carroll, “Sentence Comprehension and Memory”, in Psychology of Language, 5th edition, Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Wadsworth, page 134",
"text": "[I]n a garden path sentence, we interpret a sentence in a particular way only to find out near the end that we misinterpreted it. The subjective impression is that of being led down a garden path until discovering at the end that we took the wrong way and have to retrace our steps.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2013, Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, Michael K. Tanenhaus, “Sentence Comprehension before and after 1970: Topics, Debates, and Techniques”, in Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, Michael K. Tanenhaus, editors, Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures (Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics), Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 85",
"text": "A garden path sentence contains a temporary ambiguity[…]. It becomes clear that something has gone wrong when the comprehender receives input that is incompatible with the past-tense analysis of the ambiguous form[…]. The parser then must abandon its initial parse and attempt to reanalyze the input.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words."
],
"id": "en-garden_path_sentence-en-noun-kEB0ffQ3",
"links": [
[
"linguistics",
"linguistics"
],
[
"sentence",
"sentence#Noun"
],
[
"parse",
"parse"
],
[
"incorrectly",
"incorrectly"
],
[
"read",
"read#Verb"
],
[
"ambiguity",
"ambiguity"
],
[
"word",
"word#Noun"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(linguistics) A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "garden path"
},
{
"word": "garden-path sentence"
}
],
"topics": [
"human-sciences",
"linguistics",
"sciences"
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "hu",
"lang": "Hungarian",
"sense": "a sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words",
"word": "becsali mondat"
}
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"ipa": "/ˈɡɑː(ɹ)dən pɑːθ ˈsɛntəns/",
"tags": [
"Received-Pronunciation"
]
},
{
"ipa": "/ˈɡɑːɹdən pæθ ˈsɛntəns/",
"tags": [
"General-American"
]
},
{
"audio": "en-au-garden path sentence.ogg",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/da/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg",
"tags": [
"Australia"
],
"text": "Audio (AU)"
}
],
"word": "garden path sentence"
}
{
"etymology_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "lead someone up the garden path",
"3": "lead someone up (or down) the garden path"
},
"expansion": "lead someone up (or down) the garden path",
"name": "m"
}
],
"etymology_text": "From the idiom lead someone up (or down) the garden path, because readers form an interpretation of the sentence which remains plausible until near the end of the sentence, at which point the readers realize that their interpretation cannot be right (they have been led up a garden path) and they must try another interpretation.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "garden path sentences",
"tags": [
"plural"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"head": "garden path sentence"
},
"expansion": "garden path sentence (plural garden path sentences)",
"name": "en-noun"
}
],
"hyphenation": [
"gar‧den"
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "noun",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"English countable nouns",
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English nouns",
"English terms with IPA pronunciation",
"English terms with audio links",
"English terms with quotations",
"en:Linguistics"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1995, Reiko Mazuka, Kenji Itoh, “Can Japanese Speakers be Led down the Garden Path?”, in Reiko Mazuka, Noriko Nagai, editors, Japanese Sentence Processing, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pages 295–296",
"text": "Whether a particular construction causes a garden-path effect depends on the specific grammar of the language. For example, the famous example of an English garden-path sentence in (1) [\"The horse raced past the barn fell\"] would not exist if the past tense form of the verb race were not identical to the reduced relative form, the former of which is the preferred reading for this sentence.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005, Michael W[illiam] Eysenck, Mark T. Keane, “Language Comprehension”, in Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook, 5th edition, Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, page 362, column 1",
"text": "One of the functions of punctuation is to reduce any ambiguity, and readers are less confused by garden-path sentences that are punctuated than by those that are not[…].",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2008, David W. Carroll, “Sentence Comprehension and Memory”, in Psychology of Language, 5th edition, Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Wadsworth, page 134",
"text": "[I]n a garden path sentence, we interpret a sentence in a particular way only to find out near the end that we misinterpreted it. The subjective impression is that of being led down a garden path until discovering at the end that we took the wrong way and have to retrace our steps.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2013, Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, Michael K. Tanenhaus, “Sentence Comprehension before and after 1970: Topics, Debates, and Techniques”, in Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, Michael K. Tanenhaus, editors, Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures (Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics), Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 85",
"text": "A garden path sentence contains a temporary ambiguity[…]. It becomes clear that something has gone wrong when the comprehender receives input that is incompatible with the past-tense analysis of the ambiguous form[…]. The parser then must abandon its initial parse and attempt to reanalyze the input.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words."
],
"links": [
[
"linguistics",
"linguistics"
],
[
"sentence",
"sentence#Noun"
],
[
"parse",
"parse"
],
[
"incorrectly",
"incorrectly"
],
[
"read",
"read#Verb"
],
[
"ambiguity",
"ambiguity"
],
[
"word",
"word#Noun"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(linguistics) A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words."
],
"topics": [
"human-sciences",
"linguistics",
"sciences"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"ipa": "/ˈɡɑː(ɹ)dən pɑːθ ˈsɛntəns/",
"tags": [
"Received-Pronunciation"
]
},
{
"ipa": "/ˈɡɑːɹdən pæθ ˈsɛntəns/",
"tags": [
"General-American"
]
},
{
"audio": "en-au-garden path sentence.ogg",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/da/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/En-au-garden_path_sentence.ogg",
"tags": [
"Australia"
],
"text": "Audio (AU)"
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "garden path"
},
{
"word": "garden-path sentence"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "hu",
"lang": "Hungarian",
"sense": "a sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words",
"word": "becsali mondat"
}
],
"word": "garden path sentence"
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.