A Note on Garden Path Sentences in Chinese-Thomas Hun-tak Lee.pdf

2006. In Linguistic Studies in Chinese and Neighboring Languages: festschrift in honor of Professor Pang-hsin Ting on his seventieth birthday, eds. Dah-an Ho, Samuel Cheung, Wuyun Pan and Fuxiang Wu, 491-518. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. A Note on Garden Path Sentences in Chinese * Thomas Hun-tak Lee Chinese University of Hong Kong 1. Introduction It is well known that English sentences such as (1-2) show garden path effects. Scanning from left to right, the sentence is structurally ambiguous up to a certain point. While more than one representation can be assigned to the sentence, the language processor favors only one of these possible representations, which ultimately turns out to be incompatible with the rest of the sentence.1 (1) #The horse raced past the barn fell. (2) #Without her contributions failed to appear. For example, in parsing (1) from left to right, the processor favors a main clause analysis which will run into problems when one reaches the second verb fell, since the clausal representation will not have a subject. Similarly, in parsing (2) from left to right, the processor will favor grouping contributions with her as object of the preposition without. This representation will, however, be disrupted when one encounters the verb failed, as the sentence on that analysis will be left without a subject. What kinds of sentences count as garden path sentences in Chinese? This is a question that has not received a satisfactory answer in the psycholinguistics literature. In the last two and a half decades, a number of syntactic studies have investigated the contexts that give rise to syntactic ambiguity in Chinese (Xu 1979, Huang 1985, Feng 1995). The seminal study of Xu (1979) has observed the ambiguity of structures such as (3-6), all of which involve the nominalizer de.2 Each of these phrases can be *This paper originated from earlier pres