The usual example, and the first example I encountered, is \u201cThe horse raced past the barn fell.\u201d When I first heard that, I insisted that it was ungrammatical; it took me quite a while to understand that it means \u201cthe horse [that was] raced past the barn fell [down].\u201d<\/p>\r\n
For more discussion of the concept, and a couple more examples, see the abovelinked Wikipedia article.<\/p>\r\n
What brought the concept to mind today was the opening line of a science fiction story:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nDawn was just beginning to color the sky. She huddled inside the small bathroom\u2026<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
(From Gardner Dozois\u2019 1972 story \u201cMachines of Loving Grace.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n
I initially assumed that Dawn<\/i> referred to a time of day; then when I got to the she<\/i>, I assumed \u201cDawn\u201d was a character name; then it became clear that my original interpretation had been correct, and that this was one of those stories that refer to the protagonist by pronoun rather than name.<\/p>\r\n
(I don\u2019t know whether this technically counts as garden-path by linguistics standards; the confusion is at a semantic level rather than a syntactic level. But it seemed to me to be at least a related concept.)<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019m pretty sure that that doubled disorientation was unintentional; nothing else in the story leads me to think that Gardner intended the opening to be confusing. I feel like the editor (Damon Knight) ought to have suggested rephrasing.<\/p>\r\n
But I nonetheless think it\u2019s kind of a neat effect.<\/p>\r\n
(\u2026And now, although the connection is very tenuous, I can\u2019t resist mentioning a joke that my friend Rob used to say sometimes: \u201cKnight passes. Dawn bids two diamonds.\u201d I don\u2019t know whether that was original to him or not.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,45,28,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-garden-path","category-grammar","category-names","category-puns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17662,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17659\/revisions\/17662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}