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Comment by alt227

6 days ago

I still have never managed to understand that one properly

I think it shall be interpreted like this: The creature who fell was the horse (that was previously raced past the barn). I.e. it was not the barn that fell.

  • Thankyou that makes sense!

    So in reality this is just an incorrect sentence. It should be written as

    "The horse that raced past the barn fell"

    • It should be.

      But it’s not incorrect to say

        The tree grown tall is the one I planted
      
        The horse raced past had somewhere to go
      

      But when you don’t end the subject syntagma in an obvious way, you make it difficult to read.

      It’s easier to read

        The tree grown tall last year withered
      

      because grown has a distinct past particle form. The past particle of raced is raced, which means you need more lookahead to determine its role in the sentence.

      You can artificially push out the point at which the sentence disambiguates between whether the word is past tense or past particle, and make it seem that it’s probably past tense until it can’t be.

      You could say that the sentence is LL(k) for an unintuitively high k.