The Garden Path Sentence: Getting Rid of Sentence Ambiguity

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You’re reading a book when you suddenly come across a confusing sentence. It’s grammatically correct, but you can’t make sense of its meaning.

What you’ve read is most likely a garden-path sentence. It’s named after the saying “to be led down the garden path”—that is, to be deceived, misled, or tricked.

What Is a Garden-Path Sentence?

A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that is ambiguous or confusing. Because of the way it is structured, it initially seems nonsensical.

The confusion comes from a word group within the sentence that may have two or more meanings. It’s only after reading it a few times that we understand what it means. This ambiguity is also called syntactic ambiguity as it stems from the syntax (how words combine to create phrases, clauses, and sentences) of the sentence.

This occurs because your brain doesn’t wait until the end of a sentence to try to understand it. Rather, it tries to predict and assign meaning word-by-word. So when your initial assumption is proven wrong, you get confused and must backtrack to find which part you must re-process.

Think of how, when you text, the predictive technology on your phone attempts to finish your text for you. Sometimes it gets it right, but sometimes it’s wrong. That’s what your brain does with garden-path sentences.

Examples of Garden-Path Sentences

To better understand how garden-path sentences work, let’s take a look at the following examples:

1. The old man the boat.

When you first read this sentence, you tend to interpret old as an adjective that modifies the word man, so you assume that the subject of the sentence is a male person of advanced age. But then you arrive at the latter part of the sentence and get confused because it’s missing a verb.

Your brain is tricked by the homonyms old and man. Instead of the initial meaning you thought of, the sentence uses old as a noun meaning “elderly people,” while man isn’t a noun, but a verb meaning “to work or operate.”

A clearer version of this sentence is: “The old people are the ones who man the boat.”

2. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

On initially reading this sentence, your brain considers the words complex and houses as a single word group where the former modifies the latter. The confusion starts when you ask why complex houses are married and what the rest of the sentence means.

This sentence tricks you the same way as seen in example #1. You misinterpret which parts are the subject and verb. You also fail to realize that “married and single soldiers” should be considered as one clause.

Furthermore, the word complex turns out to mean “a group of similar buildings,” rather than the initial “complicated or intricate.”

A less confusing way to write this is: “The building houses both married and single soldiers along with their families.”

3. Is the fact that you are well known by the public?

“Well known” is a common phrase meaning popular or liked. Your brain automatically assumes that this is what it means in the sentence. So when you reach “by the public,” you think that the sentence is missing something.

The reality is that the two words’ meanings should not be considered together. Here, well means “in good health,” while known is used as a verb meaning informed or aware.

A better way to write this could be: “Does the public know that you are well?”

4. Fat people eat accumulates.

“What are accumulates and why are fat people eating it?”—is probably your first thought after reading this sentence.

Again, your brain misinterprets the parts of speech within this sentence. Your initial thoughts group fat and people as one unit, which means “people who are overweight,” but the two function differently in the sentence.

Instead, both words are used as nouns, while eat and accumulates are both used as verbs.

Simply put: “The fat that people eat accumulates in their bodies.”

5. Until the police arrest the drug dealers control the street.

A comma is implied in this sentence but your brain doesn’t know where to put it. Because of how it is structured, your first instinct is to lump together “Until the police arrest the drug dealers” as a single clause.

The remaining words, “control the street,” make no sense, as they lack a subject. So, you backtrack and search for where you misinterpreted the sentence.

A less confusing way to restate this sentence is: “Until the police move to arrest them, the drug dealers control the street.”

Garden Path Sentences in Speech and Writing

Garden-path sentences rarely occur in spoken communication. This is because people can base their understanding of a sentence on additional context clues such as inflection, pauses, and tone of voice.

Written communication has none of these. Readers rely solely on semantics (the meaning of a text), syntax (how words combine), and pragmatics (how words are used) to understand a sentence. And sometimes what a writer means just doesn’t immediately translate to the reader.

So in general, you should avoid these kinds of sentences in your writing. They interrupt the reading process, make your readers doubt you, and fail to convey your meaning effectively.

There are times when garden-path sentences work, however. When you’re specifically writing to be humorous, these syntactic ambiguities can lead to unexpected laughs. For example: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

It’s also an effective way to create eye-catching headlines. Headlines, especially those from newspapers, are often written in a telegraphic or clipped style. As a result, they often lead to garden-path sentences. For example, during World War 1, the following headline appeared in a newspaper: French push bottles up German rear.

Fixing Garden-Path Sentences

Identifying and fixing garden-path sentences can be tedious. Because you’re the writer, you can immediately understand what a sentence means. However, that doesn’t apply to your readers, who may be following a different train of thought.

Sometimes your brain just glosses over these kinds of sentences. It has a tendency of comprehending sentences superficially, which results in analyses that are “good enough.” But good enough isn’t actually accurate, so it often leads you to misunderstand the text.

To identify these sentences, a good trick is to read your work and see where you get stuck in understanding the text. You most likely have a sentence there that is difficult to read, which may or may not be a garden path sentence.

Fixing these sentences will always revolve around changing the part of the sentence that leads to ambiguity. There are many ways to go about it, but it largely depends on what the sentence needs.

Three common ways you can fix a garden-path sentence are:

  • Adding commas: Sometimes you just need to provide the reader with commas to signal where one clause stops and another one begins.
  • Adding complementizers: Complementizers are words used to introduce clauses. A few examples are that, while, since, because, if, and when. Adding in complementizers can help readers identify how some words are used and to see which words are modifying which.
  • Rewriting the sentence. Sometimes the easiest way to get rid of garden-path sentences is to change them completely.

Strolling Down the Garden Path

Most of the time, you can interpret a sentence’s meaning before you even finish it. But, like everything else in this world, sometimes a sentence may not turn out as you expect.

When it comes to your own writing, be sure to always read your own work carefully and resolve any ambiguities. Having others read it can also help you identify areas in need of clarification. Just because you know exactly what you meant doesn’t mean everyone else will!

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