Garden path sentence shirts: a story

allthingslinguistic:

ryannorth:

mrcowbird:

I thought Comic 1632 would make a nice shirt. Earlier, I had seen and bought a quite nice shirt Ryan North had made from teespring. It seemed like something I could do too: a lot easier than previous shirt making escapades, where I had to do the shipping and billing myself.

(As an aside, in case you didn’t know, Ryan North is one of my biggest heroes in comics. This will become important later in the story.)

A few days after having the idea , I get an email from none other than Thomas Bever, the first linguist to describe garden path sentences. He had seen the comic! He wanted to point out that “I like garden path sentences am delightful” is not a true garden path sentence because the speaker can use intonation and pauses to clearly convey the meaning of the sentence. Assuming you have a speaker who is trying to convey meaning rather than SOW DISCORD, you oughtn’t get led down the garden path by that sentence.

(As opposed to the classic “the horse raced past the barn fell”, where there is no way for the speaker to convey (without changing the words in the sentence) that [the horse (that was) raced past the barn] [fell].)

Anyway, I was quite starstruck, and even more than that, QUITE pleased with myself. I actually thought to myself “I bet RYAN NORTH doesn’t have Thomas Bever fact checking his linguistics comics” and “I wonder if this is what being a big shot is like”.

This also presented an amazing opportunity. I hadn’t thought to ask permission to make a shirt about garden path sentences because I hadn’t thought about who invented them. I asked if I could make a shirt out of my comic, and Thomas Bever said yes! We are going to split the profits, half going to his lab and half going to fund my projects (I’m still planning on self-publishing a book soon!)

And so, after some technical and artistic help from my friend Greg, I have this shirt design:

And this shirt!

Incidentally, the email giving me permission to make the garden path sentences also had two attachments. 

The first was a copy of the first paper that described garden path sentences, and it is a very fun, though dense, read.

The second was just a cartoon Thomas Bever had come across a while ago and liked enough to remember:

It was, of course, this comic, by Ryan North.

I AM EVERYWHERE (Also Thomas Bever is a great guy).

If you are not yet reading Dinosaur Comics, I can definitely recommend it as a source for linguistically-informed humour. (And perhaps “create a webcomic” can be added to the list of things people do with a linguistics degree?)