transformational grammar....psycholinguistic theory...oooo loook a shiny thing!

I'm pathetic at studying.

P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C

That's bad, right? Seeing as how I actually have to get through this material some way or another before Friday, it really is bad that I can't seem to focus.

I blame the sun. And the trees. And the wind. And Vick. And Damean. And Mike. And everyone-else-who-messages-me. Not myself. Of course not. That would be silly.(On a side note - I hate that I've used "And" after periods...)

SO, in order to deem this post a "study aid", I will put up some of my favourite garden path sentences and ambiguous headlines (yes, that's right. I have favourites - and there you were thinking that I loved them all).

1. Prostitutes appeal to pope.
2. Queen Mary having bottom scraped.
3. Milk drinkers are turning to powder.
4. I saw the alps flying to Romania
5. (the infamous) The horse raced past the barn fell
6. Time flies. You cannot. They move too fast.
7. Cheney hunts quail. Companions duck.
8. Drunk gets nine months in violin case.

Zeugma
1. Are you getting fit or having one?
2. The beer needs to be drunk and so do we.

To add some educational information into the post (just to make it worthwhile for me), garden path sentences are often used as proof to psycholinguists that speech processing is done serially. Essentially, as a read a garden path sentence, we are processing the syntax devoid of meaning until we realize that its wrong and we have to go back and make another syntactic representation for it. Interesting? I say so.