Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Lost on the Garden Path

Lost on the Garden Path

Talk on Garden Path Sentences delivered as part of a course on Linguistics at IIT Roorkee.

Abhishek Das

March 17, 2015
Tweet

More Decks by Abhishek Das

Other Decks in Education

Transcript

  1. What are garden path sentences? A sentence that starts in

    such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect.
  2. What are garden path sentences? A sentence that starts in

    such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect.
  3. What are garden path sentences? Sentences that lead the human

    sentence processor to construct an initial syntactic structure, which turns out to be incorrect, and thus require syntactic (and semantic) reanalysis.
  4. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

    The houses(?), which are complicated (?), got married to each other and single soldiers(?)
  5. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

    Ambiguous noun phrase Disambiguating verb
  6. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

    Single and married soldiers and their families live in the complex.
  7. While Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed.

    Ambiguous noun phrase Disambiguating verb
  8. Parsing Strategies Serial Parsing The reader continues to interpret in

    the ambiguous context until disambiguating information is given.
  9. ?