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000018_icon-group-sender_Mon Aug 19 13:10:13 2002.msg
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Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id g7JKAAU14517
for icon-group-addresses; Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:10:10 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200208192010.g7JKAAU14517@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 14:16:57 +1200 (NZST)
From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz>
To: cbbrowne@acm.org, icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Re: What about "Expressions?" (was Re: Icon Wish List)
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
There is a category of sentences called "Garden Path" sentences because
they lead the hearer down the garden path (you expect one structure,
but it has another). Mitch Marcus was particularly interested in them
because they also misled his parser, for which he claimed "psychological
realism". One idea is that people may have (at least) two strategies for
dealing with language: a fast heuristic parser that normally gets it right,
and a slow, more-or-less conscious rule-following process that can cope with
gubbins like "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
>> The horse raced past the barn collapsed.
This sentence has, as far as I am aware, a single grammatical reading.
It isn't *any* of
"The horse raced past the barn and collapsed."
[The collapse need not have been immediate.]
"The horse raced past the collapsed barn."
[The horse collapsed, not the barn.]
"The horse raced past the barn which collapsed."
[The horse collapsed, not the barn.]
and does *not* involve a collapsed horse racing.
Basically, what's going on is THAT-deletion plus a +passive reading
of "raced". Read it as
"The horse [that was] raced past the barn collapsed [then or later]."
The point of this particular example is that when we get to the word "barn"
we are expecting the next thing to be a full stop, not another verb and the
reading we _+think_ we are dealing with is -passive. To get it right we have
to go back, insert THAT, and change raced from -passive to +passive.
While it's grammatically correct, it doesn't really make _sense_.
It makes perfect sense. Someone raced the horse past the barn and the
poor animal then collapsed.
The horse hobbled past the barn collapsed.
I can't parse this one. English is an anomalous SVO language; only a very
few "fossilised" adjectives follow the noun they modify (as in
governor(noun)-general(adjective), major-general, court martial,
durance vile). So "collapsed" cannot be an adjective here. The sentence
does not admit a +passive reading for "hobbled", because "to hobble an
animal" does not admit a PATH complement, the point of hobbling is to
*prevent* the animal following much of a path.
The horse raced past the barn exhausted.
This one makes sense. "The horse raced past the barn in an exhausted manner."
It's a bit garden-pathish.
This is probably one of the places where a comma would be in order:
The horse raced past the barn, collapsed.
I can't parse this. Has an AND been deleted from it?
If it were
The horse raced past the barn, collapsed, and had a fit.
then I could parse it, but the AND seems to be necessary.