A Lexical Semantic Approach to the Garden-path Effect and the Temporal Ambiguity
Hirohito Kanazawa
March 2009 

This paper investigates what causes the garden-path (GP) effect, the difficulty in interpreting so-called ‘garden-path (GP) sentences,’ exemplified in (1): (1) GP: The horse raced past the barn fell. (Pinker (1994: 211)) Most readers/listeners are ‘led “up the garden path” to an incorrect analysis’ (Pinker (1994: 211)) and fail to parse (1) correctly. To examine the factors that trigger the GP effect, it is helpful to compare GP sentences with temporarily ambiguous (TA) sentences, as in (2): (2) TA: I knew the man hated me passionately. (Pritchett (1988: 541)) The significant difference between GPs and TAs is that TAs can be correctly analysed, despite their potential for an incorrect parse during processing, while GPs can hardly be analysed correctly. In this paper, I will propose the following hypothesis: (3) a. When people process sentences, they deduce the lexical conceptual structure (LCS) of the predicate verb (or of what they believe to be the predicate verb). Each constituent that appears in the LCS is co-indexed with the actual lexical input, with consideration given to syntactic/semantic adequacy. b. A parsing reanalysis which discards an already co-indexed relationship is costly and causes the GP effect.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007990 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	[The 2008 TSELT Award Honourable Mention] Tsukuba Review of English Language Teaching No.30 pp.92-113
keywords:	garden-path effect, temporal ambiguity, syntactic parsing, limited repair parsing, lexical conceptual structure, language processing, semantics, syntax
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