The quick brown fox

[Stephanie Briggs]

Ah, but the sentence doesn't say "The horse that was raced past the barn
fell" - the very nature of garden path sentences is their difficulty in
parsing, and it's against the rules :P to add or subtract words from the
sentence.

*****************************
~Stephanie D. (Sures) Briggs
http://skepticalspoonie.blogspot.com/ <http://sdsures.blogspot.com/>

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On 28 March 2011 18:18, Paul B. Gallagher <paulbg at pbg-translations.com>wrote:

> Stephanie Briggs wrote:
>
>  Does it really have to make sense?
>>
>> After all, in another case of linguistic trickery, there is the
>> phrase "the horse raced past the barn fell" and that definitely
>> doesn't make any sense. It's not supposed to.
>>
>
> Sure it does. The horse (that was raced past the barn) fell.
>
> An intransitive verb used as a transitive, as "race" is here, is normally
> construed as a causative -- "the horse that was made/caused to race past the
> barn..."
>
> As pointed out on the list, this is a "garden path sentence" because the
> reader normally assumes "raced" is an intransitive and doesn't consider the
> possibility of WHIZ deletion plus a causative until forced to do so by the
> appearance of the unexpected main verb at the end.
>
>
> --
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
>
>

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