Unexpected meaning
A clear path. My photo.
There’s a type of sentence much beloved of language nerds: the “garden path.”
This Substack does a lovely job of explaining the grammar behind this type of sentence: usually noun/verb ambiguity or unmarked relative clauses. In practical terms, what this means is that when reading or hearing such a sentence, you’re unconsciously guided towards a certain meaning, but at some point the grammar doesn’t fit that meaning anymore and you need to reassess.
A classic example is: “The old man the boat.” You hear “the old man” and expect to then hear what this man does, but you never get to a verb. Only in retrospect do you realize that “the old” was the subject (i.e. like “the elderly”), and “man” is the verb. What do they man? The boat.
Here’s another one: “Fat people eat accumulates.” This one took me a few moments to process even when I knew something weird was happening. Here there are a couple of unexpected revelations: “fat” isn’t an adjective and “eat” isn’t the main verb. You’re reading a dietary diagnosis: “[the] fat [that] people eat accumulates [in the body].
Garden path sentences are delightful. But they made me think a bit about where meaning is located in an English sentence, and more specifically how different languages handle this differently. I’m not nearly fluent enough in German to speak authoritatively, but I do know some verb conjugations. In German sentences the main verb often comes at the end of the sentence - this is particularly confusing in situations where modal verbs are involved: you hear that the speaker wants to or should do something, and maybe even the rationale for that desire, and only afterward do you hear what the desired action actually is. I’m not sure if this means a native (or at least comfortable) German speaker (neither of which I am) has a different sort of working memory chunk for sentence meaning; whether they suspend judgment and maintain a sort of Schrödinger’s meaning until the end of the sentence or clause.
This phenomenon happens even more dramatically in cases where the verb has a separable prefix. There are a huge number of these prefix-verb combinations, and the meanings can vary significantly, such as:
fangen (to catch) vs. anfangen (to begin)
finden (to find) vs. stattfinden (to take place or happen).
nehmen (to take) vs. abnehmen (to lose weight)
Oftentimes you can see the relationship between the prefix and the base word, and you can sort of see how the change in meaning accumulates when they’re used together, but it’s hard to predict exactly what the altered meaning will be.
More importantly for my present purposes, that prefix (ironically) goes to the very end of the sentence and so can change the meaning entirely. Some friends of mine gave me this example of the radical change that happens from appending “auf” to a particular sentence:
Der Soldat fällt in einer Schlacht.: The soldier dies in a battle.
Der Soldat fällt in einer Schlacht auf. : The soldier distinguishes himself in a battle.
They explained that when they hear a sentence that has this kind of potential ambiguity, the meaning doesn’t resolve until they hear the last word of the sentence. I find this hard to imagine, but it’s maybe one more entry in the long list of arguments in favor of learning multiple languages (even if your headphones can do real-time Babel Fish-type translation).
Without learning the language, you’re not only unable to do this different kind of meaning processing, there’s no drive to even consider that meaning can be encoded and conveyed differently. It reduces the whole range of human expression to a straightforward 1:1 exchange of meanings. Anyone who has read their Helen Vendler (and I do urge you to do so) will remember that “paraphrasable propositional content” is not the same as “meaning” writ large.
I find it hard to explain exactly why, but I assume there’s some inherent good in being able to both comprehend and perform the mental gymnastics involved in finding unexpected meaning. One more example to close: German numbers are famously reversed, so instead of “twenty three” one says “three and twenty” (dreiundzwanzig). On one occasion years ago I had to dictate a mobile phone number to an elderly man, and I remember having a feeling of vertigo as I said “null neunundsiebzig” (i.e. zero nine and seventy), and the old man repeated back to me “null” and pressed 0, “neun” and pressed seven, “und siebzig” and pressed nine. A mental shift that’s so difficult for me that I had to reread my own sentence twice just now to confirm that I had it right was so ingrained in him that he didn’t give it any thought at all.