The quick brown fox

[John Dunn]

For me the two sentences quoted by Paul Gallagher

 The dog walked down the street fell.
                        [by its owner]
        The bride walked down the aisle was beautiful.
                        [by her father]

do not really work, because it would be more natural to insert 'being' (The dog being walked ... ; The bride being walked ... ).   I assume that the simultaneity of the actions requires specification of the present, though it is possible that there are constraints on the use of the past participle when normally intransitive verbs are used causatively.

The 'horse raced' sentence is even more problematic: I can imagine (just about) constructing a sentence such as 'The horse (being) raced for the first time ...' or 'The horse (being) raced against more experienced steeple-chasers  ...', but I cannot envisage a situation where one would talk of a horse being raced past a barn.  I am not sure whether this is due to a dismal lack of imagination on my part or to an inherent problem with 'garden path' sentences.

On the subject of the garden path, when discussing parts of speech with my students, I used to point out that there were two things that it was very difficult to do: milk chocolate and time flies.

John Dunn.
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