Garden path sentences are sentences that seem to mean one thing at first, but later words show that the structure is different. Your brain takes the most likely path, then has to back up and reinterpret the sentence.
A classic example is The old man the boats. At first, many readers treat old man as a noun phrase, meaning elderly men. But here, man is the verb, meaning to operate or staff. So the sentence means that old people staff the boats.
Another famous example is The horse raced past the barn fell. Many readers first treat raced as the main verb. Then fell appears, and the sentence has to be reanalyzed. The fuller meaning is closer to The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
These sentences matter because they show how readers process language in real time. We do not wait until the end to assign structure. We make fast guesses, and sometimes those guesses are wrong.
- First reading: the sentence seems simple and familiar.
- Later cue: a new word makes that reading impossible.
- Reanalysis: the reader rebuilds the sentence structure.
Writers sometimes use garden path sentences for humor, surprise, or to study how parsing works in linguistics and psychology.