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Richard Walker

Garden Path Sentence

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“The man charged by the police to catch the train.

Not a newspaper headline, but my first attempt at a garden path sentence, a sentence which leads you astray and needs a second take to understand. A classic example, which mine owes a lot to, is 

“The horse raced past the barn fell.”

These sentences are of interest to wordplay merchants, linguists, psychologists, those who study eye movements of readers, and AI researchers. From the earliest study of AI in any form hard-to-interpret and ambiguous expressions have been and still are are a challenge for machine intelligence.

See here for more leads on GPS, don’t get lost,

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Hi Richard, 

Very interesting post. Something I have never come across before,  will bear this in mind.

Best Wishes Gill