Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
Top comments
A similar phenomenon, at least in English, is that you can (technically) infinitely embed subclauses without using complementisers ("that", "who" and "which"). So you get unparsable things like: The dog the cat the mouse feared loathed barked. ...punctuated and complementised makes it slightly better: The dog, who the cat, who the mouse feared, loathed, barked. ...unwound makes it readable, but changes the semantics subtly but significantly: The mouse feared the cat, who loathed the dog who barked. I say…
A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian, that many garden path sentences achieve their ambiguity via hanging prepositions, e.g.: >The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. Yet the most general pattern seems to be a simple matter of loading too many words into the subject clause [1], e.g.: >The car driven past the barn crashed. We don't reach the verb until…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
HN stats
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 317
- Total comments
- 123
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-07-09 | Garden path sentenceFirst breakout | niyazpk | 124 | 42 |
| 2015-02-17 | Garden Path Sentences | Pwnguinz | 1 | 0 |
| 2015-08-18 | “The horse raced past the barn fell” – Garden path sentences | heeton | 5 | 0 |
| 2015-11-23 | Garden path sentenceBest thread · Latest 20+ point return | rgbrgb | 185 | 81 |
| 2017-03-30 | Garden path sentences | adgasf | 2 | 0 |