tags: #publish links: [[Language and Literature Resources]], [[Wordplay]] created: 2022-02-12 Sat --- # Difficult-to-parse English syntax Wikipedia has a fantastic page of examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence My favourites: ## A sentence requiring context knowledge to parse correctly > The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of styrofoam. Replace *styrofoam* with *steel*, and the word *it* refers to a different object - the table or the ball, respectively. So you can't pass this structure reliably without knowing about the material properties of the objects! ## Misleading syntax From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence : > The horse raced past the barn fell. Seems trivial, but took me a while. Hint: *the horse was raced past the barn*, and *the horse fell*. > The old man the boat. I actually failed to figure this one out without reading the explanation. Hint: *The old people man the boat.* See also [[Ambiguous adjective]]! ## Embedding / unwinding of clauses at the end > The rat the cat the dog the man walked bit chased escaped. Unpacking this little story: *Man walked dog* *Dog bit cat.* *Cat chased rat.* *Rat escaped.* [[Meta - Contact|Let me know]] if you have - thinking, like me, that German may due to moving its separable verbs to the end of the sentence be to this unwinding problem prone - for me of this in a German sentence a good example.