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://classi

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.