Parse these well formed, grammatically correct English sentences:

[ Editor: the sentences were posted by Juzer Mohammedshah
<jm@tc1005.pto.ford.com>.  The only replies in the collected postings
are these. ]

> 5) Fat people east accumulates

Is that "Fat people EATS accumulates"?
meaning, of course, that the fat accumulates which people eat.

[...]

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends -------------man is the subject
of the sentence, ducks is the intransitive verb, who hunts is an
adjectival clause

-- Raymond Beaton <rbeaton@delphi.com>

[ Editor: for sentences built from repeated "buffalo", see
language/english/sentences/repeated.words. ]

[ Editor: further material on this puzzle, edited separately from other collected postings (batch 14); it may repeat some of the above. ]

[ Editor: problem as stated there: ]
Parse these grammatically correct "garden path" sentences.

These are from Steven Pinker's [Editor: "Stephen" in the original] _The Language Instinct_.  All of them
are well formed, grammatically correct English sentences.  Try to parse
them correctly.  Enjoy!

1) The horse raced past the barn fell

2) The man who hunts ducks out on weekends

3) The cotton clothing usually is made of grows in Mississippi

4) The prime number few

5) Fat people east accumulates

6) The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to
   kill J.R.

And the most fiendish one:

7) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

-- Juzer Mohammedshah <jm@tc1005.pto.ford.com>


These sentences are called 'garden path' sentences - the opening words
suggest that the sentence has a different grammar to the one it actually
has, forcing the reader to backtrack and reconstruct the correct
version.  Linguists use these sentences to investigate questions about
how the brain parses sentences.

Note that you can take the pattern of these sentences and construct
truly ambiguous examples.  By analogy to the first, we could have

   The dogs walked past the fire escape

which has two different 'correct' parsings, one in which 'escape' is a
noun and another in which it is a verb.

> 5) Fat people east accumulates

I think this one's been mistyped, and that 'east' is a typo for 'eat'.

One spoiler:

> 7) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The word 'buffalo', as well as referring to several kinds of Asiatic
and African oxen, and being applied to the American bison, is a verb
meaning 'to bewilder' or 'to overawe'.  Buffalo is a town in New York
State in the USA, I believe.  The sentence then means

    Those buffalo from Buffalo that are bewildered by buffalo from
    Buffalo, themselves bewilder buffalo from Buffalo.

I think this sentence (or a variant thereof) may be in the FAQ;
certainly some discussion of the sentence "Dogs dogs dogs bark bark
bark" may be found there.

-- Gareth Rees <gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk>

[ Editor: see also language/english/sentences/repeated.words. ]