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Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
The point of the example is that the correct parsing of the second sentence, "fruit flies like a banana", is not the one that the reader starts to build, by assuming that "fruit" is a noun (the subject), "flies" is the main verb, and "like" as a preposition. The reader only discovers that the parsing is incorrect when it gets to the "banana".
The garden-path sentence effect occurs when the sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way and, when they read the whole sentence, there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected. The reader must then read and evaluate the sentence again to understand its meaning.
An expanded form of the sentence that preserves the original word order is: "Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully also bully Buffalo bison." Thus, the parsed sentence claims that bison who are intimidated or bullied by bison do themselves intimidate or bully bison (at least in the city of Buffalo – implicitly, Buffalo, New York):
The ambiguity in a locally ambiguous sentence briefly stays and is resolved, i.e., disambiguated, by the end of the speech. Sometimes, local ambiguities can result in "garden path" sentences, in which a structurally correct sentence is difficult to interpret because one interpretation of the ambiguous region is not the one that makes most sense.
These sentences are designed so that the most common interpretation of the sentence appears grammatically faulty, but upon further inspection, these sentences are grammatically sound. Garden-path sentences are difficult to parse because they contain a phrase or a word with more than one meaning, often their most typical meaning being a ...
Garden path, a path through a garden, see garden design Garden Path , a British racehorse Garden-path sentence , a sentence which leads the reader to an incorrect parse
Though not an example of a garden-path sentence, the sentence "The girl the boy the dog bit hit cried" illustrates a similar language parsing problem. The sentence, which can be rewritten (awkwardly) as "The girl hit by the boy who was bitten by the dog cried", creates a parsing problem that requires the reader to keep track of multiple verb ...