Are garden-path sentences possible in Esperanto?

Question

A garden-path sentence is one that creates confusion by the reader due to syntactic or semantic ambiguity, and often relies on the fact that the same word can have several roles (e.g., function both as a verb and as a noun). For example, in English:

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

in Dutch:

Ik sloeg meermaals de man met de wandelstok gade.

To correctly understand the sentence, one needs to go back and assign a different role to words that were already processed. Since in Esperanto the grammatical roles of words are much more expressed (the -a/-o ending, for example, makes a clear distinguishing between an adjective and a noun) – is it at all possible to create such sentences in Esperanto?

Answer 1

One way to construct garden-path sentences in Esperanto is by using a word that can either function as a modifier or as a noun phrase, e.g. ambaŭ:

Elektante inter ambaŭ infanoj atente rigardis kukon kaj torton.

When a plural noun comes directly after ambaŭ, people tend to parse ambaŭ as a modifier of the noun. But in the above sentence, ambaŭ is a noun phrase belonging to the phrase "Elektante inter ambaŭ", while infanoj is the subject of the main clause.

Similar examples can be constructed using adjectives that can function as language names (and thus as noun phrases):

Por la pola lernolibro ankoraŭ ne ekzistas.

Answer 2

I think this should be possible by leading the reader to incorrectly link a preposition to the wrong part of the phrase. Here is a slightly contrived example:

Pro manko de tempo al tempo mi iras al la loka vendejo por aĉeti lakton.

Because manko de tempo is a common phrase, on the first reading the reader might wrongly assign de tempo to be describing manko. However once al tempo is reached this parsing no longer makes sense and instead de tempo is part of the adverbial phrase de tempo al tempo.

This example could be made clearer with the addition of a comma after the pro manko.

Answer 3

Yes, garden-path sentences are indeed possible in Esperanto! :-) They might be a bit harder to construct than in English, though, as Esperanto has very little ambiguity. (Still, ambiguity does exist; I remember a scifi story transitioning from a prayer to a social commentary in a very garden-path-ish way: ”Blabla. … Amen.” Sed ne amen, ne al la am’ kondukis …)

Here’s my (contrived!) try:

Se unu minus du pontojn, ni malvenkus.

At first, the brain parses the phrase as a mathematical expression using the conjunction minus. Later, it turns out it’s a phrase describing a military situation, using the conditional form of the verb mini ”to mine”.

Answer 4

The recent question about adjective agreement (Why do adjective share their noun's ending?) prompted a discussion on my Facebook timeline where this very expression (garden path sentence) was brought up. We discussed several examples of potentialy ambiguous sentences - many of which are just as ambiguous in Esperanto.

• Mi konas viron kun ligna kruro, kiu nomiĝas Smith.
• Ŝi donis sandviĉojn al la infanoj sur paperaj teleroj.
• Mi vidis viron manĝantan en la parko per teleskopo.
• Mi iam mortpafis elefanton en mia piĵamo.

Whether these are true garden path sentences is another question.

[Read: I don't think they are - and neither do I think many of the examples given in the other answers are - although I think we've demonstrated that they're probably possible.]

I've also been contemplating wether it's possible to come up with one starting with the word estas followed by a noun. The meaning of the words changes quite a bit with what comes next:

• Estas pano (there is bread, bread exists)
• Estas mateno (the current time is morning)
• Estas vero (what follows the word ke is true.)

I haven't yet come up with a word which is fuzzy enough in meaning to fit in more than one category, but this is a limitation in my imagination, not a constraint of Esperanto grammar.