Much of the technical vocabulary used by linguistic scientists can be rather opaque to non-specialists. We really do not expect most people to understand terms like “goose-fronting” and “it-extraposition”. But some of our terminology is fairly readily comprehensible to everybody, and sometimes maybe even entertaining.
One such – I hope – more appealing technical linguistic term from the sphere of English grammar applies to the phenomenon which is known in our trade as “garden pathing”. The term refers to the well-known colloquial phrase “to lead someone up the garden path”, which means, more or less, to deceive somebody.
This seems to have come into use in the 1800s in England, when most rural dwellings did have gardens. The first known published occurrence of the phrase “lead you up the garden” is thought to be in the 1925 novel Sounding Brass by the prominent British writer Ethel Mannin, where she uses it to refer to women leading men up the garden in order to seduce them.
Mannin is herself known to have had love affairs, not only with William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet and dramatist, but also with one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, the logician and philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell.
In the vocabulary of linguistics, a garden-path sentence is one which you believe you are understanding perfectly well as you read or hear it, and you know where it is going – until you reach a point where you suddenly realise that you have not processed it correctly, and have to go back to the beginning of the sentence and start all over again.
One often-cited example of this phenomenon is The horse raced past the barn fell. This is a perfectly grammatical sentence which is entirely comprehensible until we reach the final word fell, where we suddenly realise we have misinterpreted the sentence structure and meaning. On rereading the sentence, the meaning becomes clear when we twig that the full form of the sentence is really The horse which was being raced [by its rider] past the barn fell over.
A similar example is The cotton clothing is made of grows in India; inserting “that” after “cotton” circumvents the problem.
This phenomenon of garden-pathing comes about because, as we listen to or read a newly encountered sentence in real time, we do not, as experienced fluent speakers and listeners, wait for a sentence to come to an end, but rather predict as we go along what is coming next on the basis of our lifetime of experience of processing language and speech.
Examples of other types of garden-path sentence structures include The old man the boat, which needs to be analysed as referring to old people crewing boats, where “man” is a verb not a noun.
Similarly Fat people eat accumulates cannot be understood until you realised that “fat” is a noun, so it is “the fat which people eat” being accumulated. Another type of example is Have the students who failed the exam see me, with “have” signalling a command rather than a question in this sentence.
And We painted the wall with cracks is nonsensical until you understand that “with” means “which has” rather than referring to a tool or substance.
COTTON
Cotton was probably first domesticated around 5000 BC in the Middle Nile Basin of north-east Africa. Since about 630 AD, this area has been inhabited by Arabic speakers, so our word cotton probably started life as Arabic qutn – although given the long history of the commodity, the word had probably made its way into Arabic from the area’s pre-Arabic language, Coptic.
