If there was one verb, how would you do and explain the tree?
Also, try it with both one and two verbs with an example sentence that minimizes other words.
It looks like youāre guessing where things go in the tree without understanding what all the relationships mean. The issues are mostly with conjunctions.
Youāve split the sentence into two main parts. The first part has both āthoughtā and āareā, while the second has āoperatesā. Do you see how the tree does that? Is that what you intended? It gives āthoughtā an unequal, different relationship to āareā than to āoperatesā.
I assumed for this one that the other part was fine and I treeād the conjunction ābutā correctly, so I just did the first part with one verb.
came is the main verb
down is an adverb modifying came
foot is the subject of came
his is a determiner modifying the subject foot, its giving information about whose foot it is
number-seven is modifying foot, its saying which foot, the number seven one
on is a preposition modifying came, hill is its object
the is modifying hill
ant is modifying hill, its giving information about which type of hill
Is this an explanation of the tree? I donāt know. Uhh. Maybe something like this?: I treeād it this way because I just saw other trees where subjects on the left, objects on the right, and modifiers for the verb in the middle. When I do a grammar tree my goal is to put under whatever Iām treeāing(?) something that gives more information about that thing. verbs are the most important thing in a sentence. foot gives more information about came, His gives more information about foot, etc.
Try making two trees with one verb and the other with two verbs? Ok.
I crushed an apple.
crushed main verb
I did the crushing
apple is what was crushed
an is saying that it was just some non-specific apple
I crushed and ate an apple
Something came up mid-writing. Iāll finish up tomorrow. Just going to share what I have for now, if you have any thoughts on it.
I suggest putting modifiers as the last children because subjects, objects and complements are more grammatically important types of things. Also there can be any number of modifiers, while the other types of children are more limited, and you want to be able to find all the non-modifier children easily.
Within a category (like objects or modifiers), Iād put children in the same order they appear in the sentence.
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Ok so finishing up from yesterday:
I crushed and ate an apple.
Before I did this I remembered that when I watched your video on grammar trees you did cover a tree that had a conjunction joining the two verb phrases:
So āandā here acts as the verb and then I tree it out from there. So I did:
If this is fine, should I label some stuff for clarity? Something like this:
Going off of that hereās my attempt at treeāing that again. I just focused on the first part of the sentence, so:
His number-seven foot came down on the ant hill and crushed it.
Comparing it to my other tree:
I had āitā as the object of crushed. So while āandā is acting as the verb for the tree, I still had the object coming from crushed. It should have been coming off of āandā.
Your referring to the tree I did for this one?:
She thought that they are alive but their soul operates them by remote control.
This tree?:
Hmm. Is this what I intended? Yes. Not in terms of meaning or anything like that. Honestly, I think I was confused by the āthatā doing that tree. I just did it by a process.
Ok. Now that I think about it more. I know why I did that. I donāt know if this is the right way to go about it, but I were to tree it now I would do it like this:
I would just go in the order of the conjunctions in the sentence.
I think I gave higher importance to ābutā. I donāt think there was any good reason to it. I think it was probably something like I was tired and ābutā seemed like a more proper conjunction or something. I donāt know. I split it like that because ābutā is an important conjunction or something like that.
That isnāt a principle to follow in general.
Can you tell whatās in what group? If you changed where the group nodes are, or swapped them, it would change the group memberships.
Conjunctions are like group nodes, especially āandā and āorā which can group together many things. Other conjunctions tend to only group together 2 clauses, but thatās still a group. When there are two clause conjunctions, then usually one of them groups together two clauses, and the other groups together one clause with a two clause grouping. (In general in grammar, a group of type X can go wherever an X would go.)
(There are also other conjunctions, like āwhoā, which tend to nest one clause within another rather than joining two clauses together as siblings in a group. These often get different terminology like āsubordinatorā or ārelative pronounā but I do consider them a type of conjunction.)
Where you put the conjunctions affects what group is nested in the other and what the members of each group are. Itās the differences between stuff like these:
Does this make sense?
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yes. a group like ācame and crushedā may go in a sentenceās verb slot. when you want to give children to the verb slot, they must go on the head/root/leader of the group in the verb slot in order to be a child of the whole group.
this can reduce clarity of the tree, in which case there are a variety of things you can do to improve clarity, including:
- after some less clear words, label their role like subject or object
- label conjunctions, e.g. āverb groupā, ānoun groupā or āclause groupā (or āclause subordinatorā for conjunctions like āwhoā with only one child that arenāt creating a group. Example with āwhoā that you can try making a tree for: āI met a man who was awesome.ā)
- give some words two colors. like āandā is a conjunction but itās also creating a verb group, so it could have both the conjunction color and the verb color in some way (in some videos, i put a colored dot after a word to show a second color, but it could be done other ways too)
- draw a circle around a group (or an oval or whatever) and color it with the groupās type
- add meta nodes to the tree
- switch to a graph instead of a tree, which means nodes can have multiple parents, so you could e.g. make āandā, ācameā and ācrushedā, all 3, be parents of āfootā.
- circle the group, then have children connect to the circle not to any node in the group (not a tree or graph diagram anymore. probably requires a freeform art app or paper)
Hereās an example of using meta nodes (the ones with square brackets):
Note btw that English is inherently ambiguous about whether āexpertlyā modifies āsangā or āsang and dancedā. The specific case of a modifier applying to the first member of a group or the whole group is a common ambiguity. You generally have to guess which it is from context and intuition.
I think maybe it tends towards modifying the whole group if the modifier makes sense applied to all the group elements, and if an author doesnāt want that interpretation they may rephrase things (such as moving the modified element to later in the group or in this case you can put āexpertlyā right after āsangā but just moving the modifier afterwards doesnāt work as well with adjectives). But Iām just guessing; I havenāt studied usage frequencies.
You can get similar issues with a modifier (often a prepositional phrase) or object immediately after a group, where the grammar doesnāt tell you if it applies to the whole group or the last element.
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Does āitā make sense as the object of ācameā? What does ācame itā mean? If you removed the second verb (ācrushedā), could the āitā stick around and make sense? Can ācameā even have an object, ever, in any example sentence you can think of?
PS You might think of āI came home.ā but āhomeā is actually a weird special case, not a simple noun.
How many of my CF YouTube grammar videos have you watched? Iād suggest going through the rest of those for practice next (before finding more sentences yourself). I think the videos will help. Pause and try each sentence yourself before watching what I do with it. Post if you have any questions after seeing the rest of the video. Or if you donāt have questions after several videos, post saying how itās going.
Iāll respond to the other stuff youāve asked me later today.
Just this one:
When I learned how to do grammar trees. Thats it.
Kk.
I think I can? Iām not sure though. Does group 1 contain only (a,b,c), d, and f. Or does it also contain group 2 and g and h? I think it would contain group 2.
group 2 consists of g and h only.
so this isnāt a group for our purposes?:
Ok. That makes sense.
The grammar stuff did. The group node stuff, no. I just realized Iām not even sure what even is a group node. Iāll check out your tree material again and see if its covered.
to be a child of that group of verbs, the children of that group have to come off of the head/root/leader node. in the case of the trees i was doing it would be the conjunction nodes grouping the verbs?
I tried it and no. Thinking of the kind of sentences I would use ācomeā/ācameā in, a lot use prepositions. I came over there. Over is a preposition. I came to work. to is a preposition here.
Maybe because come has to do with going somewhere and prepositions give information about that kind of stuff?
Group 1 contains group 2.
yes the āaā node groups b and c. all nodes can be viewed as the start of a subtree, or as grouping their children. naming a node group 1 is just for emphasis and communication purposes.
Conjunctions emphasize grouping more than other grammar nodes (except subordinators like āwhoā). With conjunctions, itās crucial to think about what groups youāre forming and what should be in them.
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Maybe. I donāt know why. I just consider example sentences or look in the dictionary:
Note where it says āno objectā.
Other dictionaries will say āintransitiveā instead which means it doesnāt take an object, while ātransitiveā means it does take an object. (Those terms apply to action verbs, not linking verbs.)
Some verbs have both transitive and intransitive definitions but for ācomeā I donāt see any transitive definitions.
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yes. clause conjunctions group verbs together. coordinating conjunctions like āandā can do that too, but can also group other stuff together, including verb phrases.
Ok. I havenāt posted in a while so hereās a status update:
Iāve been sick the past few days. Looking at my journaling app its been since ~5 days ago (around when I last posted).
Iāve started feeling better and should be able to do some stuff tomorrow. I did watch the second video about grammar trees and did both trees. I havenāt reviewed the second one yet because it felt like too much effort.
Iām unsure how much of this is due to the difficulty of the material for me versus how much of it was me being sick. I donāt know if Iāve been evading doing the stuff because I donāt like it or because itās too difficult (and that is made worse by being sick).
I do feel much better now, but hadnāt had much a chance to do anything because of work. Tomorrow I should be able to get stuff posted and evaluate how Iām feeling about the material.
On a slightly different note:
I had a question. If I wanted to discuss a topic is it better to open a new thread or go back to old one?
I recently started looking into caffeine being a big issue for my sleep and started reading a book called Caffeine Blues: Wake Up to the Hidden Dangers of Americaās #1 Drug .
If I wanted to talk about some of the claims and stuff in the book would it be better to do it in a thread that previously covered caffeine and stuff like this:
Or should I make a new one? The author also made some claims about thiamin and caffeine which I thought was interesting and I donāt know if it would make more sense (again) to post here: Thiamin, Vitamins and Derrick Lonsdale
Or in a new thing entirely.
This is something Iāve thought about other stuff and its partially stopped me from posting about these things (and other things). I donāt think its the primary reason (Iāve thought about some stuff in the past that I could reasonably make a thread for, I just donāt), buts its a reason nonetheless. I wonder in general what would be the best practice here.
Itās not very important. Itās fine either way. Donāt stress about it.
A lot of forums are hostile to posting in old topics. This forum isnāt.
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Being sick can be really tough. Donāt blame yourself too much if it affects you.
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