gardenpathing

Gardenpathing is linguists' jargon, not logicians'.

The classic gardenpath example is

The horse raced past the barn fell

You read it as "The horse raced past the barn", "The horse was racing past the barn". But when you hit fell, you realize that you misparsed the sentence up to this point, and it meant "the horse that was raced past the barn". Hence, to use an English idiom, the sentence has "led you up the garden path" -- it has misled you.

--And Rosta

---

How odd, I can't decipher the sentence in any way besides "The horse raced past, the barn fell."

The horse who was raced past the barn, fell.

le xirma poi pu jivna bajra va le cange sorcu dinju cu farlu

---

Well, for me, not all of the following feel gardenpathily, but they are used as examples somewhere.

• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• When Fred eats food gets thrown.

• Mary gave the child the dog bit a bandaid.
• I convinced her children are noisy.

• Helen is expecting tomorrow to be a bad day.
• I know the words to that song don't rhyme.

• She told me a little white lie will come back to haunt me.
• Until the police arrest the drug dealers control the street.

• The dog that I had really loved bones.
• That Jill is never here hurts.

• The man who whistles tunes pianos.
• The old man the boat.

• The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi.
• Have the students who failed the exam take the supplementary.

• Every woman that admires a man that paints likes Monet.
• The raft floated down the river sank.

• We painted the wall with cracks.
• The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.

• The prime number few.
• Fat people eat accumulates.

• The obese man weighed 450 pounds of grapes.

• mi djuno le du'u do ba penmi le penmi be mi xukau
  • The neat trick of a 1-token lookahead grammar, like Lojban's, is that you can't garden path the listener by more than 1 token. Which doesn't usually count. If you've heard n+1 symbols, you know exactly the syntax of the first n symbols, only the n+1th symbol remains to be resolved. (And it will be resolved by the n+2th symbol)

• • • But in this case, we don't know until the end that we are being told that "I know whether you will become a friend of a friend of mine" and not "that you will ..."
      • penmi->pendo. In this case xukau attaches to mi, so it is more like "I know whether it is _my_ friend that you will become a friend of. To get the other meaning use vau xukau.