¹School of Liberal Arts, Ludong University, Yantai, Shandong Province, China
²School of Foreign Languages/School of Literature, Ludong University,Yantai, Shandong Province /Communication University of China, Beijing, China

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Abstract—Globally ambiguous sentences can be understood in more than one way and any decoding involved can be understandable. Garden Path (GP) sentences possess a special structural feature with a semantic trigger, which calls for a much heavier cognition burden since only one decoding is reasonable. The present paper explores the data structures of globally ambiguous sentences and GP ones. The augmented transition networks (ATNs) are used to deepen the analyses and comparison of globally ambiguous sentences and GP ones. We come to the conclusion that GP sentences, syntactically and cognitively different from globally ambiguous ones, have more complex structures.

Index Terms—Natural language processing, data structure, augmented transition networks, garden path sentences, ambiguous sentences.

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Cite: Ping-Fang Yu, Jia-Li Du, "Towards a Syntactic Structural Analysis and an Augmented Transition Explanation: A Comparative Study of the Globally Ambiguous Sentences and Garden Path Sentences," Journal of Computers vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 196-206, 2012.