Below are five grammatically correct sentences. Can you figure out what they mean, and explain how you figured it out?
1. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
2. The prime number few.
3. The old man the boat.
4. The cotton shirts are made of grows in Mississippi.
5. The man who whistles tunes pianos.
All of these are examples of what we call garden path sentences. This term probably gets its name from the saying "to be led down or up the garden path," which means to be tricked, deceived, or seduced. Garden path occurs because some English words or group of words are often ambiguous. This means that these sentences can be interpreted in more than one way, and, as senior educator Brian Wasko puts it, "we readers are led down the garden path because we assume a meaning that isn't correct, then get confused by a word that doesn't seem to logically come next."
There are two types of ambiguous sentence: either there is a local ambiguity (one that is cleared up once you have heard the whole sentence), or it is a global ambiguity (one that remains even after the entire sentence has been heard). Garden path sentences normally have local ambiguity. The best way to clarify garden path's local ambiguity is to say it out loud and then analyze it by parsing.
Let's take a closer look at our five sentences, shall we?
The trick to this sentence is figuring out which word is the verb, and which is the subject. At first, it seems like "houses" is the subject and "married" is the verb---then you get to "and single," realizing too late "married and single soldiers" is a big adjective phrase. Even more confusing, "complex" seems to be an adjective modifying "houses," which makes sense logically and linguistically to us. But it turns out "complex" is meant as a noun here, as in an "office complex," and "houses" is the verb, meaning "to shelter."
So the non-confusing way to write this sentence would be: "the building shelters married and single soldiers and their families." Or to cut the redundancy, "The building shelters soldiers and their families." Basically, a needlessly complex way to describe on-base housing.
Here "prime" is being used as a noun representing "prime people," the same way "the old" represents "old people." "number" is our verb, meaning "amount to." But our brains are so used to seeing "prime number" as a noun that it's hard to separate the two on first glance. In other words: "There are few prime people around."
This deceptive sentence is indeed grammatically correct thanks to some well-placed homonyms---multiple words that share the same spellings but have different meanings. Homonym #1 here is "old," in this case being used as a noun meaning "old people" (like how you might say, "youth is wasted on the young"), not as an adjective modifying "man."
Homonym #2, as it happens, is "man," used here as verb, meaning "to serve in the force of." With that in mind, here's what the sentence is actually saying: "The old people serve on the boat."
Until the word 'grows' we're likely to interpret the sentence as being about how "cotton clothing" is made. We assume at a glance that the word 'grows' is a verb as it has always been treated as one. But after a second or third look, we'll realize that 'grows' is used as a noun, which means "the cotton plants that are cultivated in Mississippi." It then becomes clear that the sentence really means: "The cotton from which clothing is made grows in Mississippi."
The most likely response to this would be: There are two verbs, an obvious mistake! But then you look at it once more and realized that 'whistles' is part of the relative clause (also called adjective clause) 'who whistles,' which refers to its antecedent, 'the man.' To be honest, this sentence can be fixed just by placing a comma after the relative clause. Ultimately, this sentence can primarily be interpreted as "the man who whistles, can also tune pianos."
There are a lot more of these garden path sentences, you can look them up, or perhaps, you can make your own, too!
*examples and some definitions are credited to Reader's Digest.
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