Thursday, May 28, 2009

Wave Motion

2 weeks to exams! After a year, it's finally back to the good ole' days of counting down to exams! Haha, though it would be a pretty dumb thing to do at a tertiary level considering you have finals every 6 months. Still, it also means that the time to go back home draws nearer and nearer, and I'm praying damn hard that the stupid pig flu here doesn't get any worse. I'm not looking forward to being quarantined in any way.

It's been a pretty nice day.=)

We were going through something called Garden Path sentences in Linguistics the other day, and boy are they confusing. Take a look at these sentences:

The rat the cat the dog teased chased ate the cheese.
The elephant squeezed into a telephone booth collapsed.
He helped the old lady across the road.
Before the police stopped the driver panicked.
The pen the author the editor liked used was new.
The horse raced past the barn fell.

Which of the following would you consider grammatically correct?

...

Decided?

Guess what, they're ALL grammatically correct sentences. It's just that comprehending them requires more than our brain can provide sometimes. If you give them a read through again you'll be able to understand. Fun eh?

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