GARDEN-PATH SENTENCES AND LANGUAGE AMBIGUITY

Abstract

Garden-pathing is a term that originated from psycholinguistic field. As a special temporary or local ambiguity in language processing, it has been widely explored and studied from aspects of semantics, syntax, pragmatics as well as psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics over the years, since it was first put forward by Bever in the 1970s. This paper is designed to deal with the garden path phenomenon and how it is related to ambiguity in English language. It explores the concept of garden pathing, and different views related to its definition. It also shows how parsing strategies explain the way people experience garden pathing. Finally, it surveys different types of ambiguity that occur through garden pathing. This paper aims to help learners to understand the operation of human language processing mechanism and improve their abilities to deal with ambiguities in garden path sentences, which is of great benefits to learn and understand English language.