Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… committed by The Onion recently (hat tip to Jerry Zee):

(#1)

The line division really leads us to start by reading So Many Women as the direct object of Touched:

Tom Brokaw Touched So Many Women

(so that we expect a following result clause in that). But as Instagram commenters quickly noticed, we’ve been led down the garden path:

(#2)

(It’s common for commenters to pick up on features of examples that are irrelevant to the point at hand — here, the non-clausemate reflexive himself and the discursive would go out of their way.)

From Ben Zimmer on LLog, on 8/26/09, “Crash blossoms”: Chris Waigl … describes “crash blossoms” as “those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking.”

(Crash blossoms are headlines that invite garden pathing, a form of premature closure in parsing that reveals a temporary ambiguity in the unfolding sentence.)

This entry was posted on May 2, 2018 at 11:29 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Crash blossoms, Errors, Headlines, Parsing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.