- {John pet his dog and cat with vigor.}
- {<John> <pet> <his<dog and cat>> <with vigor>}
Question Based Analysis:
What happened? pet
What does the action? John
What was the action done to? dog and cat
What kind of dog and cat? his
How were they pet? with vigor
Seeing isn’t believing.
Seeing is not believing
Marking:
- {Seeing is not believing}.
- {<Seeing> <is> <not believing>}.
Question Based Analysis:
What happened? is
What is? Seeing
What is seeing? believing
What kind of believing? not
Hmm. For this one I’m kind of confused on what not is modifying. “not” modifying believing makes sense to me, but I’m unsure.
I like philosophy because it involves thinking methods.
Marking:
- {I like philosophy} because {it involves thinking methods}.
- {<I> <like> <philosophy>} because {<it> <involves > <thinking methods>}.
Question Based Analysis:
What action happened? like
Who/what did the liking? I
What was the liking done to? philosophy
What else happened? involves
Who/what did the involving? it
What is it? philosophy
It involved what? methods
What kind of methods? thinking
How are the two actions related? because
Some people don’t love truth or honesty.
Some people do not love truth or honesty.
Marking:
- {Some people do not love truth or honesty}.
- {<Some people> <do> <not love> <truth or honesty>}.
Question-Based Analysis:
What action happened? do
Who/what do? people
People do what? love
What kind of love? not
What is not loved? truth
What else is not loved? honesty
How many people? some
Hmm is love an infinitive here with the object phrase “truth or honesty”?
John and Olivia enthusiastically sang their favorite song on the stage, but singing well wasn’t enough for the actors pretending to be judges.
John and Olivia enthusiastically sang their favorite song on the stage, but singing well was not enough for the actors pretending to be judges.
Marking:
- {John and Olivia enthusiastically sang their favorite song on the stage} but {singing well was not enough for the actors pretending to be judges}.
- {<John and Olivia> <enthusiastically sang> <their favorite song <on the stage>>} but <singing well> <was> <not enough> <for the actors pretending to be judges>
Question-Based Analysis:
What happened? Sang
Who sang? John
Who also sang? Olivia
What was sang? song
What kind of song? favorite
What kind of favorite? their
How did they sing? enthusiastically
Where was it song? on
on what? stage
on what kind of stage? the
What else happened? was
what was? singing
Singing was? enough
What kind of enough? not
What kind of singing? well
why was the singing done? for
for who? judges
what kind of judges? pretending
pretending to do what? to be
who is pretending? actors
what kind of actors? the
While you’re having a discussion, never misquote anyone.
While you are having a discussion, never misquote anyone.
- Marking:
- While {you are having a discussion}, {never misquote anyone}.
- While {<you> <are> <having a discussion>}, {never misquote anyone}.
uhh. This can be re-written as Never misquote anyone while you are having a discussion.
While should be joining two phrases right? Never is an adverb, misquote is the verb, anyone is a pronoun.
Is this a special case? I don’t know what to look up here. I thought it had something to do with “never” potentially so I just googled grammar for the word never but I don’t think the stuff I skimmed mentioned something about no subject.
Oh is there an implied word? I can think of adding “you should” to the beginning but I don’t think thats right here.
I think that nuclear power is safe.
Marking:
- {I think} that {nuclear power is safe}.
- {<I> <think>} that {<nuclear power> <is> <safe>}.
This is one of the cases where it’s hard to tell the difference, based on the meaning, between multiple options for where a modifier goes. That’s one of the more common ways an exact tree is harder to figure out.
I think the contraction is a hint that is+not go together, but I’d have the same opinion if the contraction wasn’t used.
It’s hard to explain exactly why and it shouldn’t generally matter to philosophical analysis.
I think it’s an “is not” relationship with “believing” rather than an “is” relationship with “not believing”.
I wrote my comments above before seeing this.
It’s hard to tell if “not” modifies “do” or “love”. My guess is it modifies “do”. “do” is the more important (finite verb vs. object) and earlier word (comes earlier in the sentence and higher in the tree), similar to the earlier sentence where “is” was more important (verb vs. object) and earlier than “believing”. Also, if the modifier applies to the group, then it should be on the word that’s higher in the tree. So if a modifier makes sense for all members of a group, so you’re unsure, then probably apply it to the root node of that group’s subtree.
It’s not the most standard case, but it’s a common case. You see it most often with “If X, then Y.” The conjunction there is the “if”. You can do it with other subordinating conjunctions, like “X because Y” is the most standard but “Because Y, X” is correct too.
Oh maybe you meant a different type of special case than I answered. It’s also a less common case in a second way. Yeah “misquote” is a verb with no stated subject. Search for “imperative sentence”.
Is it something like this?: If you say Seeing is <not believing>, you are saying something along the lines that the subject here, Seeing, is this thing “not believing”. While if you say Seeing <is not> believing>, you’re saying that the subject, Seeing, is not this thing “believing”. I don’t know if this makes 100% sense, just sharing my thoughts on it.
Imperative sentences are how you communicate the things you need others around you to do.
When you make a request, offer advice, issue a command, or give an instruction, you use the imperative mood. Sentences that use the imperative mood are known as imperative sentences.
Typically, the subject of an imperative sentence is implied.
Hmm. “Close the door.” So when analyzing is there a need to add an implied word somewhere or is it fine without?
So:
While you’re having a discussion, never misquote anyone.
While you are having a discussion, never misquote anyone.
While {<you> <are> <having a discussion>}, {<never misquote> <anyone>}
you don’t need to add implied words but you can. if you don’t put an implied subject in the tree, and don’t put a “[no subject]” node, then you should probably put an “object” label on “door”, otherwise it’ll look like door is the subject.
I tree’d most of the sentences before seeing you do them in the video. I didn’t do the first one (so I could see how they were done) and I didn’t do the last one (I didn’t know how to tree it). So I did seven trees from that and got them all right. I did the color coding stuff but it was kind of annoying to do it in Mindnode (I had to do it one-by-one). Do you know of a way to easily color code in that program?
For The Star Beast I just looked for really easy sentences that I think I knew how to tree. I just did three so far. Here they are:
I did a bit harder one today. For semicolons, should I do something to show one was used in the tree? I just treated it as treeing two separate sentences.
“The latter was a normal state; creatures of Lummox’s breed were always ready for a little snack, even after a full meal.”
You can select multiple nodes at once then change the color. Hold down the mouse and drag a box to select multiple nodes. And/or command-click to add individual nodes to current selection. And/or command-drag-select to add a group to current selection. @LMD
“obeyed” cannot be an infinitive. An infinitive is always one specific form of a verb: the one that sounds intuitively correct with “to” in front. In general it’s the plain (unconjugated – no added ending) present tense form. Whether a word can be an infinitive or not can be checked in the dictionary and I don’t think infinitives ever end with “ed”. Like “walk” is the form that can be an infinitive; “walks”, “walked” and “walking” cannot be.
Does this make sense? If you’re not confident about this, you better look through some online resources about infinitives.
Also, can you figure out “obeyed” now?
PS In the future for tree images, please quote the sentence before the image.
In general I’d make a node for the semi-colon and treat it like a conjunction root node that joins the two clauses.
Don’t put quotation marks (") around text and also blockquote it, unless it actually had quotation makes in the original. You’ve added two types of quoting which makes it look like a quote of dialog or a quote of a quote.
The “even” part is tricky so I’m going to assign it for @lmd to try. @lmd what would you put as the parent and children for “even” here and why?
There’s an error somewhere else not related to “even”. Look around and see if you can find it @Eternity. Looks like you’re getting these mostly right.
Mmm. After searching around I’m confused between two options:
1.) had is a linking verb, obeyed is a participle, Lummox is the subject.
2.) had is a past participle, obeyed is the main verb, Lummox is the subject.
~yeah, I know. I think I need to be more careful of double-checking stuff. That happened because the Apple books app automatically puts quotes around anything you copy. Double-checking, Kindle doesn’t do that. So I think I’m just not used to that and just pasted and went with it. Regardless I need to work on being careful with that kind of stuff. I wonder if there’s a way to turn that off?
Hmm. On the left side “a” should be modifying “state”, not “normal”.
Have you looked up any lists of linking verbs? Have you found “had” on any lists? Or did you find a definition of linking verb that you think “had” fits?
Are your two options based on thinking that a participle can’t be an object, therefore had can’t be an action verb?
I take it auxiliary linking verbs are not the same as regular linking verbs. Also, while I don’t trust them, I do glance over the AI generated answers and it confused me:
You can put adjectives after linking verbs. One way to check if something is a linking verb is to consider simple example sentences with adjectives. For testing, you want to use a word that’s rarely or never used for another part of speech, like “frail”. If you can’t come up with a way to make a verb work with an adjective after, it’s not a linking verb.
Here are examples of the kind of test sentences to consider:
Joe is frail.
Joe seems frail.
Joe has frail.
Some linking verbs require specific types adjectives.
Joe smells frail. [doesn’t really make sense although it doesn’t intuitively strike me as grammatically wrong, just the content is weird. after “smells” you should have an adjective describing a smell, or maybe some sort of metaphor, but not just any adjective.]
So, a short, simple version is that participles can be objects for a few verbs.
But also look at the chart “Active participle usage versus passive participle usage” at Participle - Wikipedia
The standard view is that participles are used to form certain tenses.
For trees, if take the words forming a tense (“main” verb + “auxiliary” verbs) and make them a single node, that will avoid some grammatical complexity and be adequate for doing philosophical analysis and having discussions. You can just learn to do that and move on if you want to. (And actually that way may be better for most discussions because the other people in the discussion will probably know less about grammar than you.)
If you put the words in separate tree nodes, the finite verb must be the clause root, not a non-finite verb.
You can find grammar teaching/help pages for specific tenses that tell you stuff like:
The formula for the past perfect tense looks like this:
Subject + had + past participle of the main verb
The so-called “main verb” is notgrammatically main. Grammatically, the finite verb is main/primary. Conceptually, it kinda depends what you mean, like “main” in what sense, but calling the participle conceptually-main is reasonable.
The mainstream view pays inadequate attention to finite vs. non-finite verbs and has some problems. What they teach is mostly usable for understanding the sentences but it’s more based on special cases (one per tense) and it’s problematic to tree it with one node per word using their concepts. But it’s also useful to understand this stuff in terms of tenses and know what each tense means (native speakers tend to already intuitively know what all the tenses mean).
