Sentences Ed McCorduck English 402--Grammar SUNY Cortland .

Sentences

Ed McCorduckEnglish 402--GrammarSUNY Cortland http://mccorduck.cortland.edu

Recall the definition of sentences from slide 2 of the “Descriptive Grammar of English” lecture: “made up of phrases.” That is, the sentence Frank dies consists of two phrases, a noun phrase and a verb phrase, each of which consist of only one word:

Frank dies.

NP VP

slide 2: phrases and sentences

English 402: Grammar

Just as a much longer sentence like The man who is often called the best Frank in the world is going to very painfully but very surely die that has many words comprising the noun phrase and verb phrase also consists of just these two main phrases:

The man who is often called the best Frank in the world

NP

is going to very painfully but very surely die.

VP

(Note: This sentence actually has what is called in traditional grammar a “split infinitive error,” namely to very painfully but very surely die)

slide 3: phrases and sentences (continued)


We will use the following three categories in our analysis of sentences:

• pattern: the overall structure of a sentence determined by the type of the verb it includes

• slot: position in a sentence that can be filled only by a word of a certain class or a phrase of a certain type

• function: the grammatical/semantic role that an element filling a slot has in a sentence

slide 4: elements of sentences


To illustrate what is meant by “slots,” consider the following two sentences which both have the same three slots, one before the verb gave and two after it:

The concerned neighbor gave the bad boy a book.

slot slot slot

The concerned neighbor gave the police the bad boy.

slot slot slot

slide 5: slots


In the first sentence, the NP the bad boy occurs in the slot right after the verb gave and right before another NP slot and by this positioning usually signals what is traditionally called the “indirect object,” i.e., that entity that is the “recipient” of the action performed by the verb.

In the second sentence, the bad boy fills the second NP slot after the verb which is usually the “direct object” slot, which means that it’s for the entity that is “directly” affected by the action of the verb.

Thus, in the first sentence the bad boy is having something given to him, and the thing that is given, the book, is directly affected, i.e., touched and handled, by the subject or doer of the action, i.e., the concerned neighbor. In the second sentence, however, the bad boy since it occurs in the direct object slot is the party directly affected by the verb, i.e., the neighbor “gives” him—either by physically detaining him or pointing him out with a gesture—to the police.

slide 6: illustration of the significance of slots


Sentences can also be described as having two main parts:

• subject (subj)

• predicate (pred)

slide 7: another way to look at sentence structure


This last approach to analyzing sentences is useful in creating Reed-Kellogg (sentence) diagrams. To illustrate, let’s do a Reed-Kellogg diagram of the English sentence that makes up the shortest verse in the New Testament, namely John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” As a preliminary to drawing the diagram, we can analyze this sentence into a subject and a predicate like this:

Frank dies.

subj pred

slide 8: Reed-Kellogg diagrams


Notice that we could also describe this sentence in terms of a noun phrase and a verb phrase as mentioned starting on slide 2 above, that is, Jesus is the one-word NP and wept the single-word VP. However, I don’t want to make this correspondence between initial noun phrases and “subjs” on the one hand and VPs and “preds” on the other for a couple of reasons that would be a little too complicated to go into at this point. Instead, for a while we’ll keep defining this essential structure of all English sentences in terms of subjects and predicates.

The upshot is that with this analysis of Jesus wept we can make the Reed-Kellogg diagram of this sentence like this:

slide 9: NPs, subjs, VPs and preds


In Reed-Kellogg diagrams, a single vertical line bisecting a horizontal line represents the division between the subject and the predicate. On the horizontal line, a.k.a. the main line, you put only the headwords of the respective NP and VP that make up the subject and the predicate, and in this case the headwords Jesus and wept compose an entire NP and VP, respectively, so we simply put both on the main line and we’re done.

slide 10: illustration of a simple Reed-Kellogg diagram


Not all sentences are as simple as Jesus wept, of course. Almost all other sentences we create have more than two words, and most of those have other words besides headwords. In Reed-Kellogg diagrams, most non-headwords (for which I’m using the generic—and not very accurate—term “modifiers” here) are put on lines running down from the main line forming an angle of roughly 45 degrees. The modifying words are written on top of those lines and also on a slant, and the lines are placed under the headwords the modifiers “go with.” For example, following is the diagram of the sentence The Lord wept softly, a slightly elaborated version of the previous sentence we diagramed (or diagrammed, if you prefer):

slide 11: Reed-Kellogg diagrams of sentences with modifiers


In this case, the modifier (actually determiner and specifically definite article the that signals the following noun Lord) goes on one slanted line underneath Lord which is on the main line and the adverb softly goes under the verb wept which it “modifies.”

slide 12: example of a Reed-Kellogg diagram with modifiers


Sentences Ed McCorduck English 402--Grammar SUNY Cortland .

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