10.6.2020 These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How They Trick You.

– The Language Nerds

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These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How

They Trick You.

What if I told you that you have a blueprint for speaking a certain language? When you come across a grammatical
sentence that matches our blueprint, you easily process it and accept it as a sentence that belongs to your (native)
language. But, when you come across an ungrammatical sentence that doesn’t match the blueprint, you rule it out, as
simple as that. However, sometimes some grammatical sentences in disguise mess with the blueprint and they challenge
us cognitively. They are perfectly grammatical but generally not acceptable as they initially seem incorrect; they lead us
down a garden path. Incidentally, these sentences are called garden-path sentences. 

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Let’s see some examples of garden-path sentences. I want you to take a good look at them: 

1. The old man the boat.

2. The girl told the story cried. 
3. After the student moved the chair broke.
4. Fat people eat accumulates. 
5. The horse raced down the barn fell.
6. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

The reason why our blueprint doesn’t accept these sentences is that they require a lot of time to process, something that
our blueprint generally avoids given the automaticity and spontaneity of language. Trying to process these sentences
without parsing is like nding one’s way in a maze. Once these sentences are parsed, they become readily interpretable.
Let’s look at each one individually. 

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10.6.2020 These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How They Trick You. – The Language Nerds

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1. The old man the boat.

This sentence can be paraphrased simply as “the elderly people control the boat”. But, what exactly caused us to not
initially recognized it as such? This happened because we initially analyzed ‘old’ as an adjective describing ‘man’,
something that we thought is a noun. As you go on processing the rest of the sentence, you don’t seem to nd any verb,
which ultimately leads you to rule the sentence out. We processed this sentence as in the tree diagram below:

To get the proper reading of this sentence, you need to rewind your processing and reinterpret ‘man’ as the verb of the
sentence and the ‘the old’ as a collective noun which functions as the subject of the sentence. In other words, ‘the boat is
manned by the old (people)’. Our blueprint is satis ed now, as it processed the sentence with no question marks, as in the
following tree diagram: 

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10.6.2020 These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How They Trick You. – The Language Nerds

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2. The girl told the story cried.

I guess this is a fairly easy one. What creates confusion in this sentence is the part ‘told the story’. This is an intervening
subordinate clause that makes the sentence hard to process, because we think that ‘told’ is the main verb of the sentence,
and as soon as we reach ‘cried’ we nd ourselves at a dead-end. To make it readable to our blueprint, it has to be
paraphrased simply as ‘the girl who was told the story cried’. The processing of this sentence proceeds as follows: 

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10.6.2020 These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How They Trick You. – The Language Nerds

3. After the student moved the chair broke.

In this sentence, we initially interpret the noun phrase ‘the chair’ as the object of the verb ‘moved’. When we arrive at
‘broke’, we were already led down a garden path, and our interpretation of the sentence crashes.  In order to get the proper
reading of this sentence, ‘the chair’ should be reanalyzed as the subject of the verb ‘broke’. Just add a comma after
‘moved’ and all the confusion will clear: ‘after the student moved, the chair broke’. But in speech there are no commas, are
there? 

4. Fat people eat accumulates.

Paraphrase this sentence as ‘the fat that people eat accumulates in their bodies’, and give your brain a rest. But, how were
we not able to accept it at rst? Okay let me break it down for you! Initially, we analyzed ‘fat people’ as the subject of the
verb ‘eat’, and by the time we reached ‘accumulates’, we were already at a dead-end, since our blueprint couldn’t nd any
object nor subject of ‘accumulates’. It’s only when ‘fat’ is reanalyzed as the subject of ‘accumulates’, and ‘people eat’ as
subordinate clause modifying ‘fat’, then we could properly process the sentence. 

5. The horse raced down the barn fell.

I guess you are already familiar with this one. In this sentence we are misled into analyzing the ‘horse’ as the main subject
and ‘raced’ as the main verb.  As soon as we reach ‘fell’ we trace back our steps and reanalyze ‘raced’ as a verb in a
subordinate clause that modi es ‘the horse’. The sentence has this reading: “the horse that was raced past the barn fell”.
This is illustrated in the following gif:   

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10.6.2020 These Sentences Are Perfectly Grammatical. Learn How They Trick You. – The Language Nerds

Source: google sites

I will let you tweak your mind with the last example. See if you can nd your way inside the garden path. Here are more
examples: 

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
The orist sent the owers was pleased.
The man whistling tunes pianos.
I convinced her children are noisy.

Please click the share bottom down below if you think this is interesting. Thank you for stopping by. See you in my next
article. 

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