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The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1] Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]
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.
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.
Various sentences using the syllables mā, má, mǎ, mà, and ma are often used to illustrate the importance of tones to foreign learners. One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37]
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 ...
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Examples include sentences like The critic wrote the book was enlightening, which is ambiguous when The critic wrote the book has been encountered, but was enlightening remains to be processed. Then, the sentence could end, stating that the critic is the author of the book, or it could go on to clarify that the critic wrote something about a book.
Garden-path sentence, a sentence which leads the reader to an incorrect parse Topics referred to by the same term This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Garden path .