(Originally Published Feb 26, 2016)

I wish that I could definitively tell you why it is called a Garden Path Sentence, because at the end of this post, even if you understood what it was, that would be the question that lingers, that you walk away with. There are a thousand different ways to say you tricked someone - why "garden path"?

What I can tell you is that it gets its name from the idiom "to lead someone down the garden path." This means to mislead or deceive someone. A little internet searching results in a paving website that tells me the first usage of the phrase has been credited to Ethel Mannin, who used it in the novel Sounding Brass in reference to women who led men "up the garden" with the intention of seducing them.

I cannot say if this is correct - a paving website hardly seems like an authoritative source - but the purpose of the garden path sentence is, without question, to seduce. This kind of sentence tries to lure you to a false conclusion, resulting in confusion.

Take a look at the first example from this week's buffalo post:

“The old man the boat.”

Now, this is absolutely a complete sentence, but a reader could logically assume that it is nonsense. On a first (or even a subsequent) reading, the reader assumes the subject of the sentence (who or what the sentence is about) is "The old man," or a man that is old. As a result, the reader would reasonably assume an action would follow, but there is no verb; instead, the object of the sentence "the boat" appears without anything following or seeming to introduce it.

The key to making sense of this sentence, and most garden path sentences, is to carefully consider the language being used. Most of the garden path sentences that I have seen rely on the use of words that can act as multiple parts of speech. In the case of this example, "man" is assumed to refer to "a male person" on the first reading. This word can also be used, however, to mean "occupy" or "control." If we were to change the sentence to "The old steer the boat," it suddenly makes more sense. We see that the "old" is not being used as an adjective for the subject, but rather that "the old" is the subject, as in old people. When finally we figure out the dead end this sentence led us into, we can see that the actual meaning of the sentence is that "the old [people] [steer] the boat."

See if you can make sense of this one, which uses the same pattern:

“Some crazy bed a long time.”

The use of unexpected subjects can also be manipulated by omitting a relative pronoun, such as "that," "who," or "which." We do this all the time by the way, so don't think this is a trick. When I say "This is the gum I chewed," there is an implied "that" that is not included: "This is the gum [that] I chewed." Including this pronoun means virtually the same thing to us as removing it because we understand the connection between the ideas being discussed, but this becomes more complicated when those connections are more ambiguous (like with the buffalo buffalo buffalo sentence). Consider the following:

“The dog walked up the path barked.”

On our initial reading, it seems like we have a complete sentence with "The dog walked up the path," but our understanding is complicated by the use of "barked" at the end. A reader might struggle with this for a long time until they consider the missing relative pronoun. If we insert it, the meaning becomes clearer: "The dog [that] walked up the path barked." Now it is clear that the subject is not simply "The dog," and the action is not "walked up the path." Instead, with the use of the relative pronoun, we can clearly understand the subject to be "the dog that walked up the path" with the action performed being "barked."

These kinds of sentences show how large a problem ambiguity can be in English. See if you can figure out the ones below.