Punctuation Matters

While writing my last post, I came across another, better example of a garden-path sentence:

"Shielding my eyes from the blast of debris I caught the power of the churning wheels swept up a filthy halo of water and dirt."

What do you think this sentence means? For the past several hours, I thought it had this structure:

Shielding my eyes from the blast of debris[,] I caught[V1] the power of the churning wheels swept[V2] up a filthy halo of water and dirt.

This doesn't make any sense of course since there are two verbs in the main clause, which is ungrammatical. I thought maybe the writer was just being sloppy, but then just now this came to me:

Shielding my eyes from the blast of debris I caught[,] the power of the churning wheels swept up a filthy halo of water and dirt.

Lesson? Commas are your best friend.

Led Down the Garden Path

My focus in linguistics has mainly been on sociolinguistics and language change, but I've always found syntactic ambiguities pretty interesting. One type that I came across lately is the garden-path sentence.

A garden-path sentence is one where the structure (i.e., the syntax) that a person has come up with at the beginning for a sentence doesn't make sense with what comes later. I recently came across this sentence: "Without warning a deafening blast cut the howling winds apart." In this example, there are actually two possible garden paths plus the grammatically correct structure:

1. Without warning ["warning" acts as a gerund taking "a deafening blast" as its direct object] a deafening blast... (nobody went to warn a blast)
2. Without warning [introduction of a subordinate clause normally indicated by "that"] a deafening blast... (nobody warned that something would happen involving a deafening blast)
3. Without warning [pause usually indicated by a comma -- "without warning" is an adverbial prepositional phrase] a deafening blast... (there was no warning, and then something happened involving a deafening blast)

Besides being ungrammatical, the first garden path doesn't make sense. How do you warn a blast? Do you go talk to it? Because of this semantic incongruity, it's rather likely that if people were led down this garden path, they would quickly reparse the sentence to get to the correct meaning. However, there is a good chance that people will be led down the second garden path because it is quite plausible pragmatically. If there was going to be a deafening blast, you would expect people to give warning. In any case though, this is still ungrammatical. The grammatical form is the third one listed. But of course, you knew that, or if you were momentarily led down the garden path, you figured it out in a second or two.

Besides the fact that these types of sentences can sometimes lead to funny or odd interpretations (the classic "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana"), the big implication is that no matter how quickly people read, people-make-sense-of-a-sentence-one-word-at-a-time.

In any case, as garden-path sentences go, this one really wasn't that bad at all. I've seen a lot worse. Like crash blossoms.

False Alarm

It's 3:49 am right now. As I was about to turn off my computer, I had the vague, uneasy feeling that I was forgetting to do something important. Suddenly, I remembered: I need to check what the markets are up to.

Sorry, that's totally not it. Not only is it not Monday morning, but even if it were, this Monday is Labor Day, and the (US) markets would be closed anyway. Maybe there wasn't anything important to begin with, or if there were, I still can't remember it anyway.

This false alarm does bring up something I've been thinking about, though: Is investing a job or a hobby?

I don't consider myself a professional trader or investor because I don't have the pretensions of one. I don't work for a bank or hedge fund, and I don't spend all day looking at a screen, or shell out hundreds or even thousands of dollars on investment newsletters, or move around large chunks of cash. But in some ways, I am one; I know a lot about investing, far more than the average person, and probably more than average person who calls himself an "investor." It all depends on how you define "professional" versus "amateur."

If we're looking at strict definitions, aren't I a professional if it's my profession? It's what I do for a few hours nearly every day. Since I don't have a job, it's pretty much the only way I make money (although I'm not investing my money so I can spend it). On the other hand, as I said, I don't have the professional's pretensions. I'm not investing so I can put food on the table.

Maybe I should consider myself an amateur, then, in the older sense of the word. The word "amateur" sometimes has the pejorative connotation of somebody inexperienced in what they're doing, but some amateurs have made pretty impressive contributions; I'm thinking especially of "gentleman scientists." In this case, there's no difference between a professional and an amateur other than one does it for money (his profession), and one does it for love (amor, the ultimate source of the word "amateur").

On the other hand, I'd be thrilled if I could turn my hobby into a money-making activity -- that is, enough of a money-making activity that I could live off of my investments. So, right now I'm still an amateur. But let's kick it up a notch. I recently made a thousand bucks in a day's work. If I can make $3000 in a day, or achieve a return of 150% in a year, I'll consider myself a professional. Until then, I'm doing this for the love of it.