Garden Path

A garden path sentence, such as "The old man the boat" (meaning "Old people are the crew of the boat"), is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced.

Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing.

Readers tend to parse a sentence by trying to add new words to a phrase as long as possible until the phrase being read no longer makes sense. This fact demonstrates that when analyzing a sentence, readers pay attention to syntax first, building meaning one chunk at a time based on their own experiences, and then semantics are brought in later to make sense of the words that were just read. At some point, it may become clear to the reader that the next word or phrase cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far; it is inconsistent with the path down which they have been led. Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text. This phenomenon is important in theoretical linguistics, and is discussed at length by literary theorist Stanley Fish.

Simple ambiguity does not produce a garden path sentence; rather, there must be an overwhelmingly more common meaning associated with the early words in a sentence than is involved in a correct understanding. Confusion mainly arises because the reader attempts to understand the sentence as it is being read, assigning roles to words that they usually fall under. Whether a sentence is misleading can thus be a matter of degree, and may depend on the reader or listener's idiolect and familiarity with particular word meanings.

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