A garden path sentence is a sentence for which the responder’s most intuitive interpretation is an incorrect one, ultimately luring them into an improper parse. (h/t @tjmahr)
It’s missing my favorite garden-path: The horse raced past the barn fell.
I’m pretty sure that many of these are not grammatically correct:
- First one is okay;
- Second one ought to be ‘The man, whistling, tunes pianos’ or ‘The whistling man tunes pianos’;
- Third should be ‘The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi’ or ‘The cotton, of which clothing is made, grows in Mississippi’;
- Fourth is surprisingly solid;
- Fifth: ‘The author wrote that the novel was likely to be a best-seller’ or ‘The author wrote “the novel was likely to be a best-seller”’;
- Sixth: ‘The tomcat, curled up on the cushion, seemed friendly’ or ‘The tomcat that was curled up on the cushion seemed friendly’;
- Seventh: ‘The man, returned to his house, was happy’ or ‘The man that was returned to his house was happy’; and
- Eighth is pretty solid (‘government plans’ is a reasonably common subject) but could be ‘The government’s plans to raise taxes were defeated’.
Nice to get some grammar exercise once in a while.
Orthography is not grammar. All of these sentences are perfectly grammatical and can be easily understood when said aloud with appropriate intonation.
