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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.
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.
At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to reparse it, with "fruit flies" as the subject and "like" as the main verb. The first sentence predisposes the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second. After reparsing the second, it becomes clear that the first sentence could be re-parsed in the same way.
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.
In linguistics, a comparative illusion (CI) or Escher sentence [a] is a comparative sentence which initially seems to be acceptable but upon closer reflection has no well-formed, sensical meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have .
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 .
Reed–Kellogg diagram of the sentence. The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are: a. a city named Buffalo. This is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence; n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid ...
Romance languages, such as French, are normally verb-framed, and Germanic languages, such as English, are satellite-framed. This means that when expressing motion events, English speakers typically express manner in the verb, and French speakers (like Italian, Portuguese and Spanish speakers) typically express path in the verb, and either leave out the manner of motion completely or express it ...