Garden Path sentences

[womzilla]

Two weeks ago, at the NYRSF weekly meeting, agrumer and bugsybanana both commented on a sentence that was hard to read correctly, the first time through:

The play is anchored in the tripartite model of being proposed in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).

It's hard not to read "being" as part of a single, multi-word verb ("being proposed") rather than in the correct sense, as a gerund which is the object of the preposition "of". This lead me to a discussion of "garden-path sentences", where the initial sense of a word is completely redefined by later parts of the sentence. The canonical example is "The horse raced past the barn fell", in which "raced" is first interpreted as the action of the sentence ("the horse raced past the barn") and is then redefined as part of a relative clause (the horse that was "raced past the barn" is the one that fell).

On NPR this morning [as I started writing this--June 29. I think], I heard a much better one:

North Korea has turned in to China [pause] its declaration of its nuclear weapons programs.

That is, North Korea has prepared a declaration, and turned it over to China. But before the pause, it's a completely difference sentence.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"The horse raced past the barn fell"

I read this as meaning that the horse raced past a thing called a "barn fell", a "barn fell" being a cutting of timber kept in a barn, or perhaps the pelt of a barn. If "fell" is intended as a verb, not a noun, it would have to be "The horse that raced past the barn fell," but then "fell" sounds as if it wants to be transitive, so then "The horse fell, the one that [had] raced past the barn," or "The horse - the one that raced past the barn - fell" would be better.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Fall doesn't appear to have any transitive uses, at all (at least in the traditional, takes-a-direct-object sense; there are several senses of fall that take various complements, mostly prepositional phrases). So I'm not sure what you mean, especially when your rephrasings are quintessentially intransitive, with the verb phrase consisting of a single finite verb.

Also, the horse doesn't do the racing; someone raced the horse past the barn, i.e., caused the horse to race past the barn. The horse isn't the subject of raced, it's the direct object. The omission of relativizer that and the subject of raced (inferrable from context) are perfectly grammatical; e.g. The portrait painted in 1603 sold for $5M..