A fork in the road to the garden path
I told my son to brush his teeth and he said “我的牙刷没了。” I suddenly
realized this could be interpreted in two ways, “I lost my toothbrush”
and “I brushed my teeth off” (“I brushed my teeth until they were
gone”).
我的 (my)
牙刷 (toothbrush)
没了 (gone)
我的 (my)
牙 (tooth/teeth)
刷 (brush (v))
没 (until it/they was/were gone)*
了 (particle of completion)
*This is a complement of result; complements of result are put after verbs to show the result of the verb. Another example would be 吃胖 (eat until you’re fat).
The normal interpretation of this sentence is “I lost my toothbrush”, so it’s not a classic garden path sentence, but it has a reasonably salient garden path interpretation, kind of like a fork, where one path leads to the garden, and one doesn’t.
Can anyone think of other two-or-more-character nouns where the last
character(s) also have verb senses? China satellite map