1056: Garden Path Sentences Oct 30, 2017

Intonation of individual words in a sentence, both in tonal language and non-tonal languages conveys syntactic information that is not present in written texts. Generally, because there are conventional ways to arrange a sentence, including information from word-order or even adjective-order cues, as well as having a knowledge of lexicon, this fact does not hinder readers. Nevertheless, certain sentences, sometimes called "garden path sentences" may appear initially ungrammatical at first but when stressed differently will make sense. One famous example is “fat people eat accumulates” which may be initially read with the phrase 'fat people' instead of thinking of them as two nouns, i.e. 'fat [that] people'. This type of confusion can come from all sorts of factors, but perhaps the most common reason is the use of substantive adjectives or the lack of hyphens in many compounds. It should be noted that this is not the same as syntactic ambiguity, because here the whole phrase only has one acceptable interpretation.