ashwin@uicsl.UUCP (12/23/83)
#N:uicsl:8600033:000:269 uicsl!ashwin Dec 22 11:08:00 1983 (((] Does anyone know the origin of the phrase "to lead <someone> up the garden path"? Ditto "garden path sentences"? Did these evolve from the same set of concepts and connotations? Ashwin Ram University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ...uiucdcs!uicsl!ashwin
dinitz@uicsl.UUCP (12/28/83)
#R:uicsl:8600033:uicsl:8600034:000:1752
uicsl!dinitz Dec 27 09:18:00 1983
The full form of the expression is: to lead someone down the garden
path, only to slaughter them at the wall (presumably, all formal
gardens are enclosed by stone walls). I am not familiar with the
expression's origin. Garden path sentences are display exactly this
type of behaviour from the processing point of view -- you are led down
a garden path, thinking that you are parsing it correctly, until the
very last word, which reveals that the structure is drastically
different than you had been led to believe.
E.g.: The horse raced past the barn ........................... fell.
My first encounter with the term was in connection with the paper which
describes the Marcus parser, PARSIFAL. I don't know whether Marcus
coined the term himself, or borrowed it from the psychological or
linguistic literature. He uses the evidence that English speakers get
hung up by such sentences as justification for certain features of his
parser. Conversely, he claims PARSIFAL will get hung up by the same
garden path sentences as humans (though I have heard grumblings that
this is not exactly true in all cases).
Recently, usage of the term "garden path" has become sloppy around our
lab. Some people have been using it to describe sentences which are
merely ambiguous, rather than misleading. I suspect this is because
the term is correctly used to describe sentences which are ambiguous,
so long as they don't seem ambiguous until you hear the end. One weak
example is:
They are flying ......................................... planes.
>From there I guess it is just a small jump to calling any ambiguous
sentence a garden path. As a technical term passes into common usage,
we can expect it to lose precision -- such is life.
Rick Dinitzrpw3@fortune.UUCP (01/09/84)
#R:uicsl:8600033:fortune:8100009:000:958
fortune!rpw3 Jan 9 10:07:00 1984
The classic "garden path" sentence I have run into was in German.
I don't speak it, but the NMR chemistry research group I was
associated with at the time had to translate the manual for a new state
of the art NMR spectrometer (made by the Germans, of course) which had
no English manual yet. There was this monstrously long sentence that
started near the beginning of a certain page and wound on down the page
and just as you turned to the top of the next page it ended with
"nicht".
Now (somebody correct me if wrong) I was told that in German the
"nicht" at the end not only negates the sentence (which the translator
had been laboriously making into colloquial English), but it also
subtly changes many of the idioms, altering them entirely in some
cases. Hence the "garden path..."
Rob Warnock
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