Abstract
Garden path sentence is a kind of complex sentence which may cause structural and semantic ambiguity. Psycholinguistic analysis is the conventional approach to it. This paper will survey garden path sentence via viewpoint analysis within a systemic functional linguistic frame. In another word, garden path sentence will be discussed in term of lexicogrammar, clause complex, transitivity, theme and rheme, and cohesion and their relationship with viewpoint. It is expected that this approach will help to the interpretation and disambiguation of garden path sentences. Garden path effect attributes to polysemy of lexis, syntactic structure and sentence reader’s viewpoint.
Highlights
What leads us down the garden path in analyzing a sentence? We initially choose one interpretation by some experiences or habitual strategies. Reisberg (2010: p. 324) argues that people tend to assume that the sentences they hear or read are active rather than passive, and so they generally interpret a sentence’s initial noun phrase as the “doer” of the action and not the recipient
Garden path sentence is a kind of complex sentence which may cause structural and semantic ambiguity
Garden path sentence will be discussed in term of lexicogrammar, clause complex, transitivity, theme and rheme, and cohesion and their relationship with viewpoint
Summary
What leads us down the garden path in analyzing a sentence? We initially choose one interpretation by some experiences or habitual strategies. Reisberg (2010: p. 324) argues that people tend to assume that the sentences they hear or read are active rather than passive, and so they generally interpret a sentence’s initial noun phrase as the “doer” of the action and not the recipient. In the hearer’s aspect, there is a kind of risk in his interpretation of the garden path sentence He may apply his viewpoint and subjective experience to analyze the lexical units and syntactic structure of the sentence, and relate them to the possible relevant context, being linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, or situational. He will achieve a sense of contentment if he succeeds in parsing and understanding this garden path sentence. Xie terms of functional terms such as lexicogrammar, clause complex, transitivity, theme-rheme structure and cohesion
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