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Sentences
Ed McCorduck
English 402--Grammar
SUNY Cortland
http://mccorduck.cortland.edu
slide 2: phrases and sentences
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
English 402: Grammar
slide 3: phrases and sentences (continued)
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)
English 402: Grammar
slide 4: elements of sentences
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
English 402: Grammar
slide 5: slots
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
The concerned neighbor gave the police
slot
slot
English 402: Grammar
slot
the bad boy.
slot
slide 6: illustration of the significance of 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.
English 402: Grammar
slide 7: another way to look at sentence structure
Sentences can also be described as having two main parts:
•
•
subject (subj)
predicate (pred)
English 402: Grammar
slide 8: Reed-Kellogg diagrams
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
English 402: Grammar
slide 9: NPs, subjs, VPs and preds
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 singleword 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:
English 402: Grammar
slide 10: illustration of a simple Reed-Kellogg diagram
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.
English 402: Grammar
slide 11: Reed-Kellogg diagrams of sentences with modifiers
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):
English 402: Grammar
slide 12: example of a Reed-Kellogg diagram 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.”
English 402: Grammar