garden-path

Verb

garden-path (third-person singular simple present garden-paths, present participle garden-pathing, simple past and past participle garden-pathed)

1. To mislead with a garden path sentence.
   • Therefore, a sentence with an initial gap, such as Who asked Meg to persuade Jill to inform Ted that Bob had spoken to Tom?, would garden path an active parser just as often as (17) would, and both sentences would be considerably more troublesome to an active parser than to a passive one.1978, Janet Dean Fodor, “Parsing Strategies and Constraints on Transformations”, in Linguistic Inquiry, volume 9, number 3, →JSTOR, page 443
   • We anticipated that the reader would be garden-pathed immediately on encountering the disambiguating verb of a sentence like (3).1998, Simon P. Liversedge, Kevin B. Paterson, Martin J. Pickering, “Eye Movements and Measures of Reading Time”, in Geoffrey Underwood, editor, Eye Guidance in Reading and Scene Perception, Elsevier...