garden pathing relative clause

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 4, 2008, at 10:26 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> Is it just me, or does the last sentence in this excerpt from an
> article
> (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/nyregion/03bishop.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Paul+Moore&st=nyt&oref=slogin
> )
> about the late activist Episcopalian bishop Paul Moore yield a garden
> path?
>
> =================
> Paul Moore Jr., the late, revered Episcopal bishop who became a
> national figure of liberal Christian activism from the cathedral's
> pulpit in the 1970s and '80s, had lived a secret gay life...
> In an elegiac article in the March 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine
> titled "The Bishop's Daughter," the poet Honor Moore describes her
> father, Bishop Moore, who died in 2003 at 83, as alternately
> passionate and elusive, capable of deep "religious emotion," yet just
> beyond her emotional reach. It was only after he died, she said, that
> she fully realized that he had had gay relationships during his two
> marriages, the first of which produced his nine children.
> ==================
>
> For me, the strong suggestion on the first pass is that it was the
> first of his gay relationships that produces his nine children, which
> then (not inexplicably) forces a reprocessing.  Others I've checked
> with split on whether or not they get the garden path.

i got the 'gay relationships' reading first.  i'm not at all sure that
this belongs in with the classic garden path examples, but it's
certainly an instance of an attachment ambiguity -- in which the
reading some of us get first is the "high attachment" one, rather than
the intended "low attachment" one (some people take low attachment to
be the default).

arnold

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