garden-path

English

Alternative forms

• garden path

Verb

garden-path (third-person singular simple present garden-paths, present participle garden-pathing, simple past and past participle garden-pathed)

1. (linguistics) To mislead with a garden path sentence.
   • 1978, Janet Dean Fodor, “Parsing Strategies and Constraints on Transformations”, in Linguistic Inquiry, volume 9, number 3, →JSTOR, page 443:

     Therefore, a sentence with an initial gap, such as Who asked Meg to persuade Jill to inform Ted that Bob had spoken to Tom?, would garden path an active parser just as often as (17) would, and both sentences would be considerably more troublesome to an active parser than to a passive one.

   • 1998, Simon P. Liversedge, Kevin B. Paterson, Martin J. Pickering, “Eye Movements and Measures of Reading Time”, in Geoffrey Underwood, editor, Eye Guidance in Reading and Scene Perception, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 66:

     We anticipated that the reader would be garden-pathed immediately on encountering the disambiguating verb of a sentence like (3).

   • 1991, Paul Gorrell, “Subcategorization and Sentence Processing”, in Robert C. Berwick, Steven P. Abney, Carol Tenny, editors, Principle-based Parsing: Computation and Psycholinguistics, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, →ISBN, page 284:

     Specifically, if the parsing model incorporates a property that permits delay, why doesn't this property insure that the parser will never be garden-pathed?

   • 2004 [2016], Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map”, in Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, editors, The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, Abingdon: Routledge, →ISBN, page 16:

     ‘Mitty’ owes much of its interest to violating this rule in its opening pages, deliberately ‘garden-pathing’ the reader into mistaking Mitty’s fantasy world for his actual world (as, apparently, Mitty himself is inclined to do).

   • 2012, Antonio João Carvalho Ribeiro, “Good-enough comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese garden-path sentences”, in Giuseppe Mininni, Amelia Manuti, editors, Applied Psycholinguistics: Positive effects and ethical perspectives, volume 1, Milan: FrancoAngeli, →ISBN, page 399:

     Additionally, the GP sentences were read significantly more slowly than correspondingly NGP controls, as showed in Fig. 2, below, since these BP complex structures are parsed by following Late Closure and thus garden pathed the subjects (see Ribeiro, 2005).

   • 2021, Megumi Hamada, Learning Words from Reading: A Cognitive Model of Word-Meaning Inference, London: Bloomsbury Academic, →ISBN, page 89:

     The participants were more easily garden pathed to the interpretation of The teachers as the doer (or agent) of “taught,” which led them to make the judgment that the sentence beginning with The teachers did not make sense.