garden-path sentence

Noun

garden path sentence (plural garden path sentences)

1. A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to the ambiguity of a word or words.
   • Whether a particular construction causes a garden-path effect depends on the specific grammar of the language. For example, the famous example of an English garden-path sentence in (1) ["The horse raced past the barn fell"] would not exist if the past tense form of the verb race were not identical...1995, Reiko Mazuka, Kenji Itoh, “Can Japanese Speakers be Led down the Garden Path?”, in Reiko Mazuka, Noriko Nagai, editors, Japanese Sentence Processing, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum...