A Cognitive Analysis Of Garden Path Sentences

Garden path sentence is a special local ambiguity in language and has been one of the hot research spots of linguistics and psycholinguistics. Since the seventies of last century, this particular language phenomenon has called attention of many linguistics and psycholinguistics researchers abroad who then proposed their own theories and analyses with focuses on different aspects. But the domestic research in China is still in the ascendant. By the event-domain cognitive model and the prototype theory as well as the relevance theory, this paper analyzes the syntactic, psychological, and pragmatic factors that cause the emergence of English garden path sentences from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Inspired by this, the psychological and pragmatic factors that influence the understanding of Chinese garden path sentences as well as the similarities and differences between Chinese and English garden path sentences in syntax are made in this thesis. Therefore, it tries to answer the following four research questions:(1) What are the cognitive syntactic factors that cause the garden path sentences in English?(2) What are the cognitive psychological factors when people understand the garden path sentences?(3) What are the cognitive pragmatic factors that the English garden path sentences are generated and understood?(4) What are the characteristics of Chinese garden path sentences?By applying theories in cognitive linguistics, the major findings of the research are:(1) In English, there are three kinds of garden path sentences with local ambiguity. They are garden path sentences caused by main verb/reduced relative clause, by lexical category and by direct object/subject. The study finds that main verb/reduced relative clause, lexical category and a few direct object/subject garden path sentences all result from the hierarchical nature of the Action or Being in an event-domain. But some other direct object/subject garden path sentences in English are generated by the hierarchical nature of syntactic structures.(2) Different categorical information possessed by the Actions and Beings and the hierarchical nature of syntactic structures influence the readers’ understanding. The choice of different distinctive information in the Action or Being is determined by the prototype samples in readers’ cognition. They first adopt the prototypical information to understand the sentence and meet obstacles. Finally they use the non-prototypical information to reinterpret. These are the main cognitive psychological factors when people understand the garden path sentences.(3) Due to the principle of economy, the addresser unconsciously uses the garden path sentences which are locally ambiguous to offer information. This kind of ambiguity is unintentional and accidental, which often results in communication difficulties or failure. However, for the addressees, they first understand the sentence with the optimal relevance, which produces erroneous assumptions and implicatures. And then they reread the sentences, adjust the cognitive context, and finally obtain the correct understanding.(4) There are also garden path sentences in Chinese. And there exists commonness and differences in Chinese and English garden path sentences. The common factor that contributes to the garden path sentences in the two languages is the hierarchical nature of the Actions in an event-domain.Garden path sentences caused by direct object / subject exist both in the two languages. The difference is that the Chinese has its unique grammatical structures. The diversity of word level in Chinese can not be differentiated by morphological changes. In Chinese, there are garden path sentences caused by “de + NP” structures, preposition object / subject and Particle / verb. However, such garden path sentences caused by main verb / reduced relative clause and by lexical category in English basically do not exist in Chinese.