A Garden Path Sentence from Amy Hempel
"The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how he knows if he likes you is he puts on Hank Williams and do you know who that is singing?"
In her novella Tumble Home, Amy Hempel exploits the reader’s expectations regarding word order. Knowing that the reader expects a sentence’s structure to conform to a well-worn path, she flouts these expectations, leading to temporary confusion when she lets a sentence rip. By veering in an unexpected direction, Hempel shows us with careening syntax the travels of the narrator’s troubled mind.
For example:
The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how he knows if he likes you is he puts on Hank Williams and do you know who that is singing?
When overgrown syntactic trees carry a structural ambiguity where the reader can go astray, linguists call this effect “garden path” (as in “to be led down the garden path”). The phrases in such sentences interact in a way that taxes comprehension, forcing the reader to take a second pass at building structure. The classic example of a garden path sentence is: The horse raced past the barn fell. The sentence is confusing because the reader thinks they are done processing the sentence at the end of “barn,” and only then does the main verb “fell” appear. This type of confusion can be avoided by rephrasing the sentence unambiguously: The horse that was raced past the barn fell. Garden path sentences are grammatical, but they begin in such a way that the reader’s first interpretation will likely be incorrect.
Here is Hempel’s sentence again:
The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how he knows if he likes you is he puts on Hank Williams and do you know who that is singing?
This sentence is deliciously complex for many reasons. First, the reader anticipates that after the conjunction “and” will come the pronoun “he,” with more information about the neighbor. The adverb “how” forces the reader to rethink where the sentence is going.
The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how
In the end, so many independent clauses are gathered in the confines of this greater single sentence, which amasses an astounding seven verbs in total, that it is almost comical.
(((The nearest neighbor is from the South), and ((how he knows if (he likes you) is (he puts on Hank Williams))) and (do you know (who that is singing))))?
Processing this sentence slows down comprehension and perception. As we continue reading, we have to negotiate our expectations to fit the information in the sentence. But as we see with Hempel’s sentences, the disorientation of having gone down the garden path is not gratuitous. It is the point.
The effect of this structurally confusing sentence is to impose a temporary loss of mooring, created by the defamiliarizing garden path that we travel on our way to the intended meaning. The disorientation the reader experiences while navigating the complicated phrases, doubling back until their meaning becomes coherent, causes the reader to sense the narrator’s anxiety.
This is an adapted excerpt from my paper Garden Paths and Brick Walls (Fiction Writers Review)