Abstrakt
The article describes basic types of garden path sentences, i.e. sentences which are grammatically accurate but result in misinterpretation owing to the erroneous identification of the syntactical function of polysemous words or expressions. A syntactical analysis of the sample sentences revealed 10 different types of garden path sentences.
The key factors contributing to the misinterpretation are homonymy across word classes, ellipsis, juxtaposition, and also the reader's expectation of a likely ending of a sentence caused by the frequency of certain collocations. The article compares the phenomenon with ambiguity.
Whilst ambiguity contains two deep structures, garden path phenomena have only one deep structure. The double interpretation of garden path sentences is possible only up to a certain point, when the reader realizes the error and has to reanalyze.
The author calls the phenomen "ambiguity up to a point" or "syntactical illusion".