:Your examples can indeed be parsed, but you have to agree some effort is required. To parse these sentences, I think we are not just using our unconscious linguistic competence. We're using all of our cognitive facilities to understand them (i.e., we're solving them the way we would solve a puzzle.) Our "parsing" unit (i.e. Wernicke's area) can't finish the job alone, otherwise these sentences would parse as effortlessly as any other sentence. I think there's a back and forth between semantic clues, grammatical constraints and general intelligence.