dialect in novels

[Arnold Zwicky]

bethany dumas:
  >>dInIs:

  >>The horse raced past the barn collapsed.

 >I have always used

 >The horse raced past the barn fell.

 >What's the original?

the original is: The horse raced past the barn fell.  from
articles and books by tom bever (and various collaborators) in
the early 70s.  (i'm at home in bed with a nasty cold/flu and
so can't check my library, but if anyone really really needs to
know exact details, i could supply them next week.)

the effect is *not* created by just any sentence whose initial part is
capable of several very different continuations.  such sentences are
everywhere.  *any* sentence beginning Subj HAVE could be continued
with the form of HAVE understood as a main verb (possessive HAVE, as
in "I have a Camry"; causative HAVE, as in "I have my students write
essays on the verb HAVE"; affective HAVE, as in "I had an asteroid
crash into my car, omigod"; obligative HAVE, as in "I have to go now";
possibly others) or as an auxiliary verb (perfect HAVE); up to the
point where the form of HAVE is uttered, the initial portion is
many-ways ambiguous, but this seems to cause no problem for listeners,
who process on, holding these possibilities in mind until later
material determines an interpretation.  (speakers do this with
ambiguous words in general.)

garden-path sentences are different.  speakers seem to strongly
prefer one interpretation, and then get hung up if the other one
turns out to be the right one.  in the standard examples, the
preferred interpretation is the one with the least embedded structure
in it ("raced" interpreted as the verb of the main clause rather
than as the verb in a postnominal modifier).

there are lots of neat wrinkles in this.  for one thing, the effect
shows up robustly only when the verb form is plausible either as the
verb of the main clause or as a postnominal modifier.  sentences
beginning "a dressmaker fashioned" will be understood with "fashioned"
as a verb with subject "a dressmaker", but one beginning "a dress
fashioned" will be understood with "fashioned" as a modifier of "a
dress".

the point is that in the garden-path phenomenon, ordinary people
processing speech in real time tend to boggle.  (you can detect
boggling experimentally via, for example, the time it takes for
people to decide whether some sentence they are presented with,
visually or orally, is a sentence of english.)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)