Garden Path discourse

I've sometimes mentioned this particular example with friends and colleagues because I always thought it was particularly interesting. And kind of funny too. Anyway, if you've ever taken a Muni car in San Francisco and are a little observant, you may have seen a sign on the side of one door that stated - I go by memory so if somebody sees it and can correct me, the better. Especially for spacing and line breaking, I don't recall exactly - something like this:

PLEASE HOLD ON
SUDDEN STOPS
NECESSARY

Now this wouldn't be particularly funny, or interesting if it weren't for the fact that both I and a few others that noticed the sign experienced a variation of the well known garden-path phenomenon. Garden Path sentences are sentences that - because of the statistically unlikely usage of certain words in combination - initially lead the reader to build the wrong interpretation of the sentence, and only going back and rereading the sentence taking the less-likely local interpretation (the garden path, indeed) can the sentence be assigned a coherent meaning. A famous example is "Fat people eat accumulates". Now, mostly this phenomenon tends to occur in processing written language because prosodic information can give a great deal of clues about which path is actually the more likely to yield the correct interpretation (making statistical distributions actually dependent on more than just morpho-syntactic characteristics of the words/sentence).

The example from the SF Muni cars is interesting because the text is actually a small discourse fragments. The correct interpretation is naturally "Please hold on / Sudden stops [are] necessary." It is interesting that my first experience with this sign - and reputedly, that of a few other people whose reactions I could observe when first confronted with the sign - was something to the effect of "Please hold [on sudden stops]PP. / ???Necessary" at which point the interpretation had necessarily gone bad and needed that I went back and through the garden, so to speak.

Now, the interesting fact is that while new-line information is initially consistent with the sentence breaking (a CF after hold on should lead us to believe that there is a sentence break there) I in fact seemed to have ignored this fact and interpreted the remaining part as direct continuation of the first line. In my intuition two factors are probably affecting this, one there is probably statistical evidence that hold on is less likely to be interpreted as a phrasal-verb construction than it is to be used in its literal meaning, with a PP argument. A curious side comment is that a statistical evaluation in the language interpreter's mind is most likely contextualized by her surroundings. Hold on in its phrasal verb construction (with on as a particle) is more likely to mean "wait a second" than it is to mean "hold on something"(*) In the context of a riding a streetcar - which I was - I was quick to (correctly) assume the sense of grabbing for the word hold, in which case the PP argument was more likely. This notwithstanding the clear clue of a new line after the particle on. Admittedly, the genre constraints given by the fact that it was a sign - and therefore that new lines are more spatially than semantically constrained - must have certainly played a significant role in all this...

If anybody can find any other example of garden-path discourses, make sure to post them here. I'm sure they're out there.

(*) I've tried to quickly verify this with google but was vastly impeded in my attempt by some recurrent Green Day lyrics....