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

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

The North Korea sentence is displaying what I think is called "right displacement". The noun phrase that identifies what has been turned in would normally fall after the in and ahead of any additional information like who it's been turned in to, but the NP is what's called "heavy"--it's a long, complex phrase, especially compared to the other constituents of the sentence, so it's picked up out of its normal place and shipped off to the right end of the sentence so it can be unraveled by the listener with more leisure. At least, that's the intent.

The speaker expects the listener to notice the missing NP between in and to and carry the need for that NP forward until the heavy phrase comes along. Instead, the listener is more likely to hear gapless in to and interpret it as an instance of the verb-particle idiom turn into. Even though in to is not really pronounced the same as into, at that point, the speaker is likely to think that the slightly odd intonation on into is probably a speech production error. It's not until an unexpected (in this analysis) NP turns up at the end of the sentence that the speaker goes back and unpacks the intended meaning.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

While I would say "Martin turned into a parking lot", I find myself inclined to say "Martin turned in to a werewolf". However, checking a number of sources online, it seems that "into" should be used for lycanthropy as well.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

I will now argue that turn into a parking lot is not an example of idiomatic verb-particle turn into but instead ordinary turn plus directional preposition into.

Et voilá! I explain away your examples with my incroyably horrid Frensh accente!

I am pretty sure that I would have always used turn into for lycanthropes. But into of course ultimately derives from in to (and its journey from Old English has done nothing to disguise this) so there's still always that lingering question of whether it's it or it's its parts.