Project Summary:
An exploration project as introduction to grammar. read part 1 of Fallible Ideas – Grammar and do the exercises with tree diagrams as well. Intended as a sub-project as part of a regular project to do the whole article. Goal:
Learn basic grammar.
Practice more with tree diagrams.
Start second project for the rest of the article. Figure out things like what resources I need for the project and what my expected error rate is. Success criteria (& optional failure criteria):
Have read part 1
Attempted all exercises
Make tree diagrams for each exercise
Big picture goal, why you want to do this, or CF relevance:
Learning grammar as philosophy prerequisite. Plan:
I’ll compare my answers to other answers on the forum to check for mistakes. If I find a mistake I’ll try to explain what the mistake is and explain the alternative solution. I would like to attempt new sentences that are similar to the ones that I failed at, however I’m not sure I can find create such sentences without already knowing the solution as I did with arithmetic expressions. Other people suggesting a sentence would be useful, but not expected, the success of the project is not dependent on it.
I will time the exercises. Context: (optional – fill out or delete the context section)
I’m not a native english speaker. I don’t remember much grammar taught in english classes in school.
Bonus exercises:
The article explains some sentences during the explanations of grammar. The article says what parts of speech the words are and what modifies what, so I thought I could make tree diagrams for them more easily than also figuring out those things myself.
I also watched Learn grammar trees (they’re better than sentence diagrams) - YouTube
Additional context: I have watched videos on grammar trees and read some forum topics of people learning grammar. I hadn’t done any exercises and I didn’t remember any solutions.
John is wise.
linking verb: is
subject: John
complement: wise
1 min
John quickly drank milk.
action verb: drank
subject: John
object: milk
adverb: quickly (modifies “drank”)
1 min 30 sec
John likes big, fast cars.
action verb: like
subject: John
object: cars
adjectives: big, fast (both modifies “cars”)
I think theres an implied “and”
3 min
EDIT: At this point I stopped specifying what modified what, since I thought the trees showed this well enough.
John went to the new store.
action verb: went
subject: John
prepositional phrase: to the new store
preposition: to
noun: store
determiner: the
adjective: new
2 min 30 sec
The ferocious dog chased three cats over the chair.
action verb: chased
subject: dog
adjective: ferocious
object: cats
determiner: three
prepositional phrase: over the chair
preposition: over
noun: chair
determiner: the
4 min 15 sec
I thought it made sense that numbers could be determiners, but I searched it up before i decided on it for the exercise.
Clever John carefully ate the very juicy steak.
action verb: ate
subject: John
adjective: clever
adverb: carefully
object: steak
determiner: the
adjective: juicy
adverb: very
2 min 15 sec
John thought hard about chemistry
action verb: thought
subject: John
adverb: hard
prepositional phrase: about chemistry
preposition: about
noun: chemistry
1 min 45 sec
John put the toy soldier in the compartment in the box on the shelf in his room.
action verb: put
subject: John
object: soldier
determiner: the
adjective: toy
prepositional pharse: in the compartment in the box on the shelf in his room
preposition: in
noun: compartment
determiner: the
prepositional phrase: in the box on the shelf in his room
preposition: in
noun: box
determiner: the
prepositional phrase: on the shelf in his room
preposition: on
noun: shelf
determiner: the
prepositional phrase: in his room
preposition: in
noun: room
determiner: his
The delicious cake with berries unfortunately fell onto the dirty floor from the floor.
action verb: fell
subject: cake
determiner: the
adjective: delicious
prepositional phrase: with berries
preposition: with
noun: berries
adverb: unfortunately
prepositional phrase: onto the dirty floor
preposition: onto
noun: floor
determiner: the
adjective: dirty
prepositional phrase: from the table
preposition: from
noun: table
determiner: the
8 min 30 sec
I spent some time deciding whether “from the table” should modify “floor” or “fell”. The floor doesn’t come from the table, but the cake fell from the table. So it made more sense to me that it should modify “fell” instead.
The whole session from starting exercises to finishing them took 40 min. This doesn’t include reading the article and doing the trees I did beforehand, which I didn’t time accurately enough.
The only mistake I could find was that I forgot the first “the” in this sentence. It is a determiner which modifies “dog”.
To avoid mistakes like this I should look over the sentence I analyzed and check whether every word, or tree element more generally, was included.
This mistake is similar. I think I did do checks for whether the nodes I put in the tree were correct for my arithmetic trees, perhaps I didn’t for this one.
I met the success criteria. It didn’t specify correctness, but it seems I only made two mistakes.
The first mistake was in the trees before the exercises, where I didn’t know what to classify “to learn” as, I didn’t yet know about infinitives so I’ll learn about that later.
The other mistake was forgetting a word. I can fix this by doing a check of the sentence and the tree to see if all the words are included.
I found out more about what to expect wrt resources needed and expected error rate for the rest of the article. I’ll first look at the the rest of the article when I fill out the template for the project and compare difficulty to part 1.
The main benefit is the grammar I learned. Also succeeding at another project. I thought this project was slightly harder than the last.
I can’t start the project for the rest of article yet, I’m too busy right now. I can probably start in 2-5 days.
