A Cognitive Pragmatic Analysis Of "Garden Path" Phenomenon

“Garden Path” phenomenon,which is short for GP,is a kind of special partial ambiguity in language.GP has attracted many great interest and attentions among linguists in the world for many years.They try to give their unique explanation on this language phenomenon from various perspectives,such as psycholinguistics,thematic grammar and cognitive pragmatics.There are many factors leading to GP phenomenon,which can be divided into three catalogs:semantic level,syntactic level and pragmatic level.This paper will study GP sentences from three perspectives: lexical processing,syntactic processing and discourse analysis.Context plays an important role in the understanding processing of GP.On the basis of the previous study,this paper attempts to apply the recent studies of cognitive pragmatic theories of linguistics,relevance theory in particular,to analyze the GP,i.e.pragmatic analysis of GP.Relevance theory is applied to analyze the understanding mechanism and misanalysis processing of these three perspectives respectively.This paper is a tentative analysis of GP from cognitive and pragmatic perspective and the author hopes that it can shed light on the understanding and processing of GP in human beings' brains.And the author also aims to propose a procedure based algorithm of cognitive processing model,it can be useful and helpful in the second language learning and teaching as well as the machine translation.Although people have made a great progress on it,it still needs more researches on a wide and deep range.