Sentences like the following are referred to as having “garden path effects” in that they involve certain structural ambiguities. State what they mean and discuss how you analyze the structure of those sentences to get the right meaning.
The old man the boat.
The old / man the boat. Old people take places working on the boat.
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi.
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi. The cotton which is usually used for making clothing grov/s in Mississippi.
Readers tend to parse a sentence by trying to add new words to a phrase as long as possible until the phrase being read no longer makes sense. This fact demonstrates that when analyzing a sentence, readers pay attention to syntax first, building meaning one chunk at a time based on our own experiences, and then semantics are brought in later to make sense of the words that were just read. At some point, it becomes clear to the reader that the next word or phrase cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far.