garden path sentence
noun/ˈɡɑːdən pɑːθ ˈsɛntəns/UK/ˈɡɑːɹdən pæθ ˈsɛntəns/US
Etymology
From the idiom lead someone up (or down) the garden path, because readers form an interpretation of the sentence which remains plausible until near the end of the sentence, at which point the readers realize that their interpretation cannot be right (they have been led up a garden path) and they must try another interpretation.
Definitions
A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to the ambiguity of a…
A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to the ambiguity of a word or words.
- One of the functions of punctuation is to reduce any ambiguity, and readers are less confused by garden-path sentences that are punctuated than by those that are not[…].
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for garden path sentence. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA