Why Produce Garden-Path Sentences? Evidence from Corpus Data across Registers

Garden-path sentences induce processing difficulty by requiring readers to revise an initial syntactic analysis (e.g., The policeman saw the lights were off). While garden-path comprehension has been widely studied, far less is known about why such sentences are produced in natural language. We thus address this gap by analyzing large-scale written-text corpora in English and Japanese across five registers. English Noun/Sentence garden-path constructions, arising from optional complementizer omission, were frequent in blogs and newspaper, suggesting that their emphasis on communicative efficiency promotes their use. Rather, Japanese Main Clause/Relative Clause garden-path constructions, which arise from grammatical constraints, were most frequent in legal texts, reflecting the register's tendency to favor complexity within a clause. Legal texts also exhibit the longest ambiguous regions across constructions, which can increase reanalysis cost. These findings suggest that grammatical properties and register-specific writing styles jointly shape the production of garden-path sentences in real-world language.