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I was surprised the diagrammed sentence had a three-way split at the top, instead of noun phrase and predicate phrase (which would have been subdivided into the

I was surprised the diagrammed sentence had a three-way split at the top, instead of noun phrase and predicate phrase (which would have been subdivided into the verb and the preposition phrase). We never diagrammed sentences when I grew up — I only ever did it in linguistics classes in college. Is it normal to have three-way splits in sentence diagramming?

gizmo686 4y ago
At least it is a tree. In grade school, I learned to make diagrams along the lines of https://classicalteachersjournal.com/tag/sentence-diagrams/ https://classicalteachersjournal.com/tag/sentence-diagrams/ . I think a 3 way split is a good compromise to favor communication over theoretical purity under a linguistic model. Sure, they could show it as a tense phrase that takes an NP and T' as children, with a T and VP child of T'. But, if you are targeting a general purpose audience, striving for that level of theoretical correctness just hurts readability for no benefit.
adrian_b 4y ago
In the tree in which a sentence is decomposed, some of the groupings of the branches are purely conventional, not based on any objective criteria. Around any verb there are several phrases with distinct roles: agent (subject of transitive verb), patient (direct object), subject of intransitive verb, subject of predicate linked by copula, instrument, beneficiary (indirect object), nominal/adjectival predicate, various kinds of circumstances (manner, place, time, direction, cause, purpose and many others). Especially in the case of the transitive verbs, where frequently many of these roles are simultaneously present, there are no good reasons for grouping some of the roles together with the verb into a "predicate phrase". The useful decomposition is into a verb and a list of roles, some of which may be implicit. This is like parsing a procedure invocation in a programming language, into a procedure name and a list of arguments, some of which may be implicit. There is also little benefit in splitting first a "noun phrase" with one of the three roles that are usually called "subject", but which do not have much in common, except that they are more frequently the topic of a sentence than other roles, and because of that in many languages the verb agrees with them (which is a redundancy that does not add information, even if it may aid in correcting errors).

gizmo686 4y ago

At least it is a tree. In grade school, I learned to make diagrams along the lines of https://classicalteachersjournal.com/tag/sentence-diagrams/ https://classicalteachersjournal.com/tag/sentence-diagrams/ . I think a 3 way split is a good compromise to favor communication over theoretical purity under a linguistic model. Sure, they could show it as a tense phrase that takes an NP and T' as children, with a T and VP child of T'. But, if you are targeting a general purpose audience, striving for that level of theoretical correctness just hurts readability for no benefit.

adrian_b 4y ago

In the tree in which a sentence is decomposed, some of the groupings of the branches are purely conventional, not based on any objective criteria. Around any verb there are several phrases with distinct roles: agent (subject of transitive verb), patient (direct object), subject of intransitive verb, subject of predicate linked by copula, instrument, beneficiary (indirect object), nominal/adjectival predicate, various kinds of circumstances (manner, place, time, direction, cause, purpose and many others). Especially in the case of the transitive verbs, where frequently many of these roles are simultaneously present, there are no good reasons for grouping some of the roles together with the verb into a "predicate phrase". The useful decomposition is into a verb and a list of roles, some of which may be implicit. This is like parsing a procedure invocation in a programming language, into a procedure name and a list of arguments, some of which may be implicit. There is also little benefit in splitting first a "noun phrase" with one of the three roles that are usually called "subject", but which do not have much in common, except that they are more frequently the topic of a sentence than other roles, and because of that in many languages the verb agrees with them (which is a redundancy that does not add information, even if it may aid in correcting errors).