The Old Man the Boat: The Garden Path and Psycholinguistics

My nephew RJM recently introduced me to "garden path sentences." I'd encountered them before, but I didn't know that there was a name for the phenomenon.

Put simply, garden path sentences start out one way and then end up veering off another way, so by the end, you have no idea what the sentence is saying.  Now, if you are thinking, "But Kathy, that's the way I feel about your writing," all I can say is that, first, that is not very kind of you to say that, and second, it's true. But that's not really what I'm talking about.  So, to clarify what a garden path sentence is, I'm going to quote from the experts at Wikipedia. And by "experts," of course, I mean "any doofus who wants to post a knowledgeable-sounding article about any subject at all on the Internet and then be quoted around the world as if they actually know what they are talking about."

So, here is what the experts at Wikipedia have to say about garden path sentences:

"A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that the readers' most likely interpretation will be incorrect; they are lured into an improper parse that turns out to be a dead end. Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate the fact that when they read, human beings process language one word at a time. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down the garden path", meaning "to be misled". According to current psycholinguistic theory, as a person reads a garden path sentence, the reader builds up a structure of meaning one word at a time. At some point, it becomes 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 he has been led down."

I know that right now you are feeling kind of confused--and, if you've made it this far, more than just a little bit bored--so I will give you some examples of garden path sentences so that you can join in on the fun instead of mucking about in the theory behind the phenomenon.  By the way, the examples will not actually help you understand garden path sentences because the whole subject is so weird and confusing that the examples only help to confuse you even more.  But here goes.

The man whistling tunes pianos.
The man returned to his house was happy.
The government plans to raise taxes were defeated

The sour drink from the ocean.

The old man the boat.Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

The confusion is most often caused by one of four things (this is my opinion, not straight from Wikipedia): confusion between an intransitive verb being used as a transitive; a missing "understood" word or words like "who," "you," "is," "was," etc.; the use of synecdoche in an unexpected place in the sentence; or mean-spirited elves coming into the newspaper office and writing headlines while the copywriters sleep. 

If you want quick explanations for the above garden path sentences without having to figure out what words like "synecdoche" mean, here we go:

The man [who was] whistling tunes pianos [for a living].
The man [who was] returned to his house was happy [about being returned].

The government['s] plans to raise taxes were defeated

The [people who are] sour [in disposition] drink from the ocean.

The old [people] ["man"--staff or work in] the boat.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. [Think about it.]

What does all of this mean? What is this leading up to? Well, I think it's obvious. I want to be a psycholinguist. 

I never heard of the field before today, and I certainly don't want to do all of the studying, researching, academic writing, and talking to people with doctorates that would be required to get an actual degree in this field, but I think that "Professional Psycholinguist" would look extremely impressive on my business card, and it would allow me to bandy about terms like "synecdoche" and "parse" in an authoritative way that would keep people from asking me what these words actually mean (which could get embarrassing for me).

So there we have it, if you are going to get led down the garden path by a sentence, make sure that you take a psycholinguist along for the trip. 

I might be available. For a fee.