A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian, that many garden path sentences achieve their ambiguity via hanging prepositions, e.g.:<p>>The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.<p>Yet the most general pattern seems to be a simple matter of loading too many words into the subject clause [1], e.g.:<p>>The car driven past the barn crashed.<p>We don't reach the verb until the last word, which not only opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose. You will produce tighter, sharper sentences by front-loading the predicate verb.<p>[1] - edited from "too many clauses" as per telemachos's astute reply.
Related, also very funny, a list of sentences used as examples to show various weird language constructs: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...</a>.<p>My favorite:<p>"In a similar vein, Martin Gardner offered the example: Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"
The process involved here seems to be a backtracking search: <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Backtracking" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Backtracking</a>
I wonder about the same phenomenon but on higher levels of organization, e.g. concepts in an explanation. Are there valid ways to explain some concept C such that the interpreter is led down a garden path.<p>More important would be the existence of exclusively garden path concepts, call it the set EGPC. EGPC is the set of concepts which can only be arrived at via explanations or chains of concepts and reasoning that include at least one misleading garden path. One goal of clear teaching would seem to be reducing the number of conceptual garden paths that students encounter; so knowing that some subject necessitates them would be useful.
I'm noticing this while reading Under the Dome. There are many sentences where I just stop at the last couple words because the sentence doesn't make sense at that point. Quite a few times I thought they were typos. When I analyze the sentence though I find that I needed to pause in another spot or use a different meaning of a word. Haven't run into this often in other books.
I did a presentation a few years ago on some studies about using prosody to resolve sentence ambiguities. The improvement in listener comprehension was measurable and dramatic. The easy conclusion to draw is that leveraging prosody in your day-to-day speech makes you better understood because the listener doesn't have to devote as much conscious attention to figuring out what you're trying to say.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)</a>
I learned about these in a linguistics course in college. My favorite from back then was, "The building blocks the sun faded toppled."<p>Depending on how you are led down it, you might have two abrupt and unanticipated words at the end.
I remember encountering several of these at the start of Van Vogt's sci-fi classic <i>World of Null-A</i>. I couldn't figure out if it was deliberate in any way, or just an annoying accident.
It won't be fun when talking about garden path sentence without bringing up the epitome of them all, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...</a>.