Grammar tree practice [AM]

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Project Summary

I think I should do more practice with grammar in order to gain more from my earlier investment in learning the basics of grammar. I’ll do lots of practice of grammar trees. I’ll go through the grammar tree videos and go through exercises other people have done.

Goal

What’s your goal? Why do you have that goal? How will you judge success and failure? What bigger picture goals or values are you pursuing? How is this relevant to CF?

I want to improve my grammar skill and build on by basic understanding of grammar. I think it’ll be useful for textual analysis, which is useful for philosophy.

The success criteria is essentially just to execute on the plan. I discuss judging success on skill level in the next section.

Plan

What’s your plan? How big is the project? What resources do you expect it to require and what have you allocated for it? How confident are you about succeeding? What sort of errors or error rate do you expect and how will you deal with that? Got any error correction mechanisms? What are the risks of not finishing the project or failing and do you have any plan to address those risks?

I plan to revise the FI grammar article and take notes on it this time. I want to do high volume of grammar tree exercises. I’m thinking of going through exercises that other people have done, this way it’s easier to find errors in my exercises through comparison. The ones I know are from Fire, Max, AnneB, and @Eternity. I’ll see if there are some in @LMD’s thread that I can do as well. I’ll also watch the grammar tree videos and do the exercises that are in them. If I have more time in the project I might practice on sentences from a book I’m reading. I will definitely do the exercises from the videos, but I might not do all the ones from the other sets I mentioned above.

In the last project I was rushing a bit to get done within the deadline, so I avoided researching much about grammar topics. I want this project to have more freedom in researching topics that come up. I want to try to research more while practicing exercises and see if it can help on some that I’m uncertain on.

Since I’m not sure how much I will do then I’m not sure how long the project should take. Perhaps not all projects must have a deadline and estimated length. Perhaps you could say you want to do a project until you reach a proficiency at a skill, and then perhaps specify an absolute maximum time to spend on the project.

If I were to do this project until I reach a certain skill level in grammar I’m not sure how to make it an objective an measurable goal. It would be easier if there were grammar practice sheets with exercises labeled as easy, medium, hard etc. Then I could say until I could do a set of 10 for a difficulty with max 1 error. Since I don’t have that I could source my sentences randomly from a book.

I wanted to do project that would take about 2 weeks. So the plan is to spend roughly 2 weeks. I’ll set the maximum time for the project at 4 weeks, at that time I’ll reevaluate whether to continue or not. I want to spend around 2-3 hours on this project daily. I’ll start tomorrow.

I’ll say the success criteria is to go through all the grammar tree videos and then do at least two of the sets that I mentioned and make notes on the FI grammar article. Later in the project, I might decide to go with the 10 random sentences from a book suggestion.

I think it would be better to have more measurable success criteria and more clear time estimation, but I think it’s better to just do project and get practice rather than having them be perfectly planned, so I think this fine for now.

I think I had an error in about 2-4 out of 10 exercises in the last project, so I would expect around the same given I have learnt from the project, but have had month long break from grammar work. Most exercises have a suggested solution which should help with detecting and correcting errors.

Here’s a tree representation/outline (.org file) of the project which I’ll also use to track time in the project:

* PROJ grammar trees
** TODO fill in project template
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2024-12-15 Sun 22:03]--[2024-12-15 Sun 22:36] =>  0:33
CLOCK: [2024-12-15 Sun 18:26]--[2024-12-15 Sun 18:37] =>  0:11
CLOCK: [2024-12-01 Sun 00:10]--[2024-12-01 Sun 00:55] =>  0:45
:END:
** TODO review grammar material
*** TODO FI article
*** TODO nonfinite verbs
** TODO watch grammar tree videos
** TODO grammar tree exercise collections
*** TODO first pass of exercises
*** TODO error correction
** TODO project conclusion

Other People

What help are you asking from others? What value are you offering to others? Will you complete the project independently if no one else participates? Why are you sharing this with others? What sort of criticism do you want?

I think I can only offer value to others who are trying to learn grammar using grammar trees.

I appreciate critique and help on the project and the answers I give. I’m quite certain I’ll complete the project without outside help.

I’m extra uncertain about the plan for this project, so I would appreciate criticism on that. Otherwise I approve of the quote above for this project as well.

I’m sharing such that I can get help, help future learners, and to build my public track record of projects.

Context

What’s the context? What’s your relevant background and track record? Why are you prioritizing this over alternative projects? Why are you doing it right now? What have you already done?

In the last project I read the FI grammar article and did the exercises in it. I think I need more practice in order to take use of what I learned. So I think this stage of grammar learning isn’t complete. I don’t need to learn all of grammar in order to be ‘complete’, but I think I need to reach a higher proficiency level at the stuff I learned before I should learn other things.

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Edit: Notes on:

Article notes

  • Grammar is about the method of talking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking, as opposed to be the content of those things.
  • Purpose is not only communication, but also thinking clearly

Part 1

  • A way to categorize sentences into two categories: simple sentences and simple sentences joined together into one sentence, i.e., complex sentences
  • simple sentences have 4 steps
    • step 1: the verb. mainly the action of the sentence. Also linking (relating things)
      • Often most important word of the sentence, put it the top of the tree
    • step 2: subject. the thing (noun) that does the action or has the link
    • step 3: object. noun that is acted on
      • also complement. the noun being linked to (or adjective)
      • an object isn’t needed for a simple sentence, but a subject is needed.
        • linking sentences need a complement though, otherwise it’s an incomplete thought
    • step 4: modifiers. gives more information about something.
      • adds detail, is often less important the verb, subject, and object
      • modify recursively (modifiers can modify modifiers)
      • can answer infinitely many different questions
  • prepositions relate a noun to something else
    • often location and time
    • prepositional phrases can act as an adjective or an adverb
      • function view: prepositional_phrase(preposition: Preposition, prepositional_object: Noun, modifiers: List[Modifier] I None) → Adjective I Adverb.
      • After reading some of part 2: another function: prepositional_phrase(preposition: Preposition, prepositional_object: NounPhrase) → Adjective | Adverb. I’m saying the modifiers always apply to the prepositional object and is therefore a noun phrase
        • Can prepositions have modifiers? Can’t think of any. can’t say “very from”

Part 2

  • complex sentence: multiple simple sentences combined into one.
  • sentences are groups of words
    • we can view each group as one things, this lets us condense information, which lets us in a way think about many things at once by focusing on important parts and not on all details (abstraction)
  • groups can consist groups
  • clause = complete though, phrase = incomplete thought
  • conjunction join things. connect or relate things.
    • coordinating conjunctions for equally important things
      • for phrases or clauses
    • subordinating conjunctions for things where one thing is more important than the other
      • often for time or reasoning
      • only for clauses
    • phrases must be of same type to conjoin
      • returns a phrase of that same type
        • conjoin_noun_phrases(conjunction: Conjunction, phrase_one: Noun_Phrase, phrase_two: Noun_Phrase) → Noun_Phrase
  • communicate importance in paragraph
    • techniques in order of preference
        1. put main points in what makes the core of the simple sentence: verb, subject, object/complement. then put details as the modifiers
        1. clauses for main points, helper points in subordinating clauses
        1. word selection, meaning of text, emphasis (italics, bolds, word position)
        1. tell directly

Part 3

  • verbals, based on verbs but are other parts of speech
    • some characteristics of verbs and some of the other part of speech they are.
      • can be a noun but also have an object for example. for example it can be an object and also have an object at the same time
    • three types of verbals
      • gerund: noun
      • participle: adjective
      • infinitive: can have “to” in front of it. can be noun infinitive, adjective infinitive, and more probably
  • references: words that refer to other words
    • pronouns: often refers to people, can also refer to things like an iPhone
    • reference adjectives: refers to things like pronouns does, are adjectives. always possessive? seems like they always refer to things being possessed by other things
    • explanatory references: explanation of what is referred to. can be many words
  • implied words: words which are meant implicitly but not stated explicitly
    • indirect objects: noun with implied “to” or “for”, is a prepositional phrase then
    • conjunctions let us leave out some words to avoid repetition

Part 4

  • we can focus on essentials of sentences by outlining only some of the sentence
    • verb, subject, and object/complements are essential
    • most modifiers are inessential, some are almost always essential like “not”. other modifiers are essential depending on context
    • outlining can help you see the structure of a sentence, it tells what the groups of the sentence are
    • can help to leave out details and add them back later to analyze difficult sentences
    • adding implied words can actually make the sentence easier to understand and analyze
    • moving word positions can help
  • every word has a purpose and can therefore answer a question of the sentence

Part 5

  • Main groups: phrases, clauses, and sentences.
    • sentences are grouped into paragraph
      • a paragraph should be about one topic
      • a sentence in the paragraph is about an idea of the topic
    • paragraphs grouped into sections and chapters.
      • paragraphs together can form a larger topic or a theme. but perhaps a theme should rather come from a group of chapters that make up a book or article. I’m thinking of a theme as being bigger looser topic
  • culture and language influences our thinking
    • English specifies a structure of thought, it tells us:
      • what are complete and incomplete thoughts
      • the pattern that thoughts must follow
      • what things are grouped together to form single entity
      • what the different categories for words are
        • that words in the same category fulfill some of the same roles and purposes as each other
        • what characteristics they can and can’t have based on category
      • it limits in how to express our thoughts

At the end I also read the article by only reading the first sentence of each paragraph.

I added a list of topics that I might research:

** TODO topics to research
*** TODO relative pronouns
*** TODO expletive
*** TODO auxiliary verbs

Here is a table of how much time I spent on the project today:

Total time 3:06
grammar trees 3:06
\_ meta 0:13
\_ review grammar material 2:53
\_ FI article 2:53

“meta” is stuff like organizing the project or writing and formatting this post outside of the topic notes.

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Please include a source link for things you post about.

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Fire collection

Learning Grammar #2 - More Parts Trees and Sentence Analyses - Other / Projects - Critical Falliblism

I’m not necessarily doing every exercise, mainly because I think some are too easy and similar to previous ones.

It was hard to separate into a first attempt session and an error correction session because Fire’s answers were right after the sentence and there was no list of the sentences.

So for future learners; here is a list of the sentences I did:

  • From Fire
    • Jack wants to build a birdhouse.
    • He gets some wood.
    • He gets some nails and paint.
    • His mom helps too.
    • She gets a pencil and ruler.
    • They build it together.
    • Then they hang it up in a tree.
  • From New Oxford Dictionary
    • I was living in Cairo then
    • (Spoiler is part of speech information that I had) [after preposition] : Phoebe by then was exhausted
    • (Spoiler is part of speech information that I had) [as adjective] : a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying.

I’ll be making a website with grammar work after I have done this project. I’ll try to get it up within January, but I won’t promise.

I didn’t have time to convert to tree images, I’ll do that to some of the exercises later, but I’ll let some just stay as markdown outlines.

Exercises

  • wants
    • Jack
    • to build
      • birdhouse
        • a
  • gets
    • he
    • wood
      • some
  • gets
    • he
    • and
      • nails
        • some
      • paint
        • [some]

Could also have ‘nails and paint’ as one node or make a circle around those nodes and have ‘some’ modify the group. If it was some nails but just a regular amount of paint then I think it would have been “paint and some nails”, if ‘some’ comes before the group then I think it applies to the whole group.

Fire let ‘some’ modify ‘and’, which I also think is fine. I think we had the same idea that ‘some’ applies to the whole group.

  • helps
    • mom
      • his
    • too

‘too’ is an adverb

I saw the Fire’s answer before I tried myself. Fire had:

I find the sentence itself feels weird. I don’t think you can say “She gets ruler”, I think you have to specify which ruler with an article.
In the previous sentence there is an ‘a’ for each item in the list:

So neither do I think you can have an ‘a’ apply to the whole group. Is “She gets a pencil and ruler.” grammatically wrong? Is there an implied ‘a’ before ‘ruler’. Not sure.

Looking at (and others, but this one talked about when to use, when not to and when to omit):
[A/An/The] Articles In English Grammar - In-Depth Guide With Examples

Another common mistake is the excessive use of articles, especially when describing professions or general categories.

  • Mistake: She is a dentist and a musician.
    Using an article before each profession can make the sentence sound awkward.
  • Correction: She is a dentist and musician.
    Omitting the second “a” creates a smoother and more natural expression of her dual professions.

This was the closest to justifying only one ‘a’, but this was about describing general categories, which ‘ruler’ is not.
I don’t think you can imply the ‘a’ either, so I just think it’s grammatically incorrect.

  • build
    • they
    • it
    • together

I accidentally saw that Fire had ‘then’ as an adverb.

  • hang
    • they
    • it
    • then
    • up
      • in
        • tree
          • a

I was a bit uncertain about ‘up in’. I think it could have been a single node. If I have ‘in’ modifying ‘up’ then ‘up’ has no prepositional object because ‘in a tree’ becomes an adverb. I think ‘up’ is answering the question “where did they hang it?”, and then we need to ask “up where did they they hang it?” “in a tree”. So could we say ‘in a tree’ is acting as the prepositional object for ‘up’? So I’ll go with this.

So Fire had ‘up’ and ‘in’ separately modify ‘hang’. Now I see you could just say “they hang it up” where ‘up’ is just an adverb. I checked New Oxford and it had ‘up’ as primarily an adverb and as a preposition secondarily. I should have checked the dictionary. But perhaps my tree works anyway though since then we have ‘in a tree’ being an adverb modifying the adverb ‘up’? I think the question based analysis works here. It’s still an error from me since I thought ‘up’ had to be a preposition.

Exercise sentences from New Oxford Dictionary

‘Then’ seemed interesting so I looked it up in the dictionary.
From New Oxford dictionary on ‘then’:

at that time; at the time in question:

Example sentence to diagram:

I was living in Cairo then

  • was
    • I
    • living
      • in
        • Cairo
    • then

Can ‘then’ modify ‘living’ here? ‘living’ is a gerund.
At first I thought ‘living’ was an noun infinitive but then I remembered @Elliot corrected me on that in the last project:

From New Oxford dictionary on ‘living/live’:

[with object and adverbial] : he was living a life of luxury in Australia.

  • was
    • he
    • living
      • life
        • a
      • of
        • luxury
      • in
        • Australia

‘if Australia’ acts as an adverb (or adjective since ‘living’ is a gerund?) and modifies ‘living’

So adverbs can modify gerunds. So ‘then’ could specify the time of ‘living’, but such a sentence has to have a ‘was’ or ‘were’. I don’t think having just ‘then living’ means the same without a ‘was’/'were. It has a different meaning in a sentence like “First work, then living.”

[after preposition] : Phoebe by then was exhausted

  • was
    • Phoebe
    • exhausted
    • by
      • then

So ‘by’ is a preposition here without a prepositional object, since ‘then’ is an adverb. From New Oxford dictionary on ‘by’ as a preposition:

indicating a deadline or the end of a particular time period: I’ve got to do this report by Monday | by now Kelly needed extensive physiotherapy.

In both example sentences ‘by’ is only modified by ‘Monday’ and ‘now’.

[as adjective] : a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying.

outline: {<Thatcher> <was> <staying>}
How do incorporate the hotel? well she was staying at the hotel, but there is no ‘at’ in the sentence, implied? Could also say ‘a hotel’ is the object of ‘staying’. And what about ‘where’?

  • was
    • prime minister (Margaret Thatcher)
      • the
      • then (adjective)
    • staying

So I can’t really fit in ‘where’ and ‘a hotel’ here. I looked up ‘where’ in New Ox:

conjunction informal

At first I was thinking having ‘where’ be conjunction could connect ‘a hotel’ to the rest of the sentence, but then I would joining a phrase and a clause.

I think this is the definition that solves the problem:

relative adverb
1 at, in, or to which (used after reference to a place or situation): I first saw him in Paris, where I lived in the early sixties.

I think ‘a hotel where’ modifies the rest of the sentence and tells us the place the staying was occurring. Swapping ‘where’ for ‘at’ or ‘in’ would let ‘in/at a hotel’ modify ‘staying’, but the sub-tree:

  • staying
    • where
      • hotel
        • a
          Doesn’t seem right.

Final answer:

  • was
    • where
      • hotel
        • a
    • prime minister (Margaret Thatcher)
      • the
      • then
    • staying

‘Margaret Thatcher’ could modify ‘prime minister’, it tells us in more detail who the prime minister was. Or it could be the other way around with ‘prime minister’ modifying ‘Margaret Thatcher’, telling us who ‘Margaret Thatcher’ was, but that would be a noun modifying a proper name (noun phrase). It’s probably something to do with the commas that I don’t know of.
Curiosity – Using Commas:

Commas are also common with appositives (two or more noun phrases in a row):

The insect_,_ a cockroach_,_ crawled on my food.
Note that the words “a cockroach” could be deleted from the sentence and it’d still make sense.

Perhaps the tree representation is just ‘a cockroach’ is a child of ‘insect’ even though it doesn’t seem like a usual modifier. Because to me it feels like it’s more like explaining rather than modifying the meaning.

Project notes

Total time 2:21
grammar trees 2:21
\_ meta 0:14
\_ grammar tree exercise collections 2:07
\\_ first attempt at exercises 2:07
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The insect_,_ a cockroach_,_ crawled on my food.

Yes it’s an appositive modifier. I’d tree “a cockroach” as a modifier child of “insect”.

Not all modifiers are or feel the same. New Oxford Dictionary has:

modifier:

• Grammar a word, especially an adjective or noun used attributively, that restricts or adds to the sense of a head noun (e.g. good and family in a good family house).

adjective:

a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.

If you like, you can check other dictionaries, wikipedia, and grammar explainers for more on this topic.

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Trees

I’ll only post trees for these sentences:

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This double preposition is not typical. My quick guess is that “in a tree” is a child of “hang” not of “up”.

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this one is incorrect FYI

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Using commas

Curiosity – Using Commas

I like cats_,_ dogs_,_ mice [optional comma] and birds.

As a general rule of thumb, leave out unnecessary things when writing. But another rule of thumb is to be clear and avoid anything confusing. So if the optional comma helps prevent confusion, it’s good, but otherwise it’s bad. The optional comma generally helps when list items are long or contain conjunctions like “and” or “or”.

I like the Oxford/Harvard/serial comma (the optional comma) because of lists sometimes having “and” or “or”. So I liked that it was less ambiguous. But otherwise it’s unnecessary. I thought I should always use it because of consistency though, since I thought of it as a convention, and I thought that conventions should at least be consistent. I think I’ll use it only when necessary from now on.

“Sports” is grouped more tightly with “car” than “red” is. It has a stronger connection. That means “sports” and “red” aren’t peers or equals. They aren’t really forming a list together because they aren’t fully the same type of thing. And if they aren’t part of the same list, that takes away the reason to use a comma.

Thats interesting. “Sports” and “red” are both adjectives, but I guess because they belong to different categories of adjectives they have different importance. It’s the same with adjective ordering, where the ordering is based on categories of adjectives. Adjectives: order - Grammar - Cambridge Dictionary:

order relating to examples
1 opinion unusual, lovely, beautiful
2 size big, small, tall
3 physical quality thin, rough, untidy
4 shape round, square, rectangular
5 age young, old, youthful
6 colour blue, red, pink
7 origin Dutch, Japanese, Turkish
8 material metal, wood, plastic
9 type general-purpose, four-sided, U-shaped
10 purpose cleaning, hammering, cooking

I would categorize “sports” as a “type” adjective. “Colour” sort of has priority over “type”, but not really because being later in the order actually puts the adjective closer to the noun, which makes sense because I would also think that ‘purpose’ would be an important type of adjective. According to this logic ‘opinion’ being first tells me that English thinks it’s not that important, probably because ‘opinion’ is cheap and can vary between people. Does English order the adjectives categories by what it thinks the categories importance is? I think so.

Adjective and modifier

OED1 on ‘adjective’:

1.Gram. Naming or forming an adjunct to a noun substantive; added to or dependent on a substantive as an attribute. noun adjective: a word standing for the name of an attribute, which being added to the name of a thing describes the thing more fully or definitely, as a black coat, a body politic; now usually called an adjective only, see B.

First sentence was too much grammar jargon. But then it describes ‘adjective’ as “describes”. I was sort of worried about describing vs modifying.

I was thinking about a link (link between nodes) meaning modifying (actually it means relationship), but really adjectives are a type of modifier, and they can describe or modify. If the adjective modifies, it’s still also describing. I can’t think of a counter example. I think it’s logically impossible to modify but not describe.

(I find it fun thinking about the meaning of ‘adjective’ and ‘modifier’, and also to think about what English considers important.)

Appositives and Appositive Phrases—How to Use Them | Grammarly:

When an appositive noun or noun phrase contains an essential element without which a sentence’s meaning would materially alter, do not frame it with commas.

My friend, Bill, owes me fifty dollars.

My friend Bill owes me fifty dollars

There are no commas here because Bill is an essential description of my friend.

Why isn’t ‘Margaret Thatcher’ essential in “a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying.”, when ‘Bill’ is? Because it’s important to know which friend is owing us money, whereas for the other sentence the important thing isn’t which prime minister, but the fact that it was a prime minister.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary on ‘modifier’:

a.****: a grammatical qualifier : a subordinate constituent of a grammatical construction

Looking at dictionaries ‘subordinate constituent’ basically means ‘child’ in tree terms.

Project notes

I tracked all of this under ‘using commas’. It was 1 hour and 7 minutes.

I’m writing things sort of like I would in a journal where I just write down some random loosely related thoughts for my own benefit. I can see that some of this would be less important to readers, so I could just write it privately and then not post it all. I think all I wrote here is relevant enough to post. I could take some feedback on this.

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I lean more towards this. Maybe I should have made it clearer that I liked “in a tree” modifying “hang” a bit more in this quote:

You had the opposite guess last time, but seemed more uncertain:

It seems we both thought it could answer the question of “where up?”

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I found that one hard. Is it the “a hotel where” part that is wrong?

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Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus on “where”:

II. noun

Synonyms: place 1, location, locus, point, position, site, situation, spot, station

Could “where” be a noun in “a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying.”? Perhaps “staying” needs an object? Perhaps “where” and “a hotel” are appositives? Or “a hotel” is the object of “staying” and “where” is an adverb on “staying” to account for the missing “at”?

I’ll try some more tomorrow.

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Project notes

Time table for today:

Total time 2:20
grammar trees 2:20
\_ meta 0:25
\_ topics to research 1:07
\\_ using commas 1:07
\_ grammar tree exercise collections 0:48
\\_ error correction 0:48

Tomorrow I’ll also read the comments of Using Commas.

I liked having better time to research topics as they came up as opposed to last project where I had to focus on finishing within the deadline.

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Reading Comments on Using Commas

Restrictive vs Non-restrictive Modifiers

I read Restrictive Modifier: Explanation and Examples - Grammar-Monster, Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses—What’s the Difference? | Grammarly and Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Modifiers and Clauses - The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing

  • restrictive is essential
    • cannot be left out
    • has essential information, meaning of the sentence changes without them
    • cannot be separated by commas
    • they limit and narrow down
  • non-restrictive is non-essential
    • can be left out
    • is additional information, can be omitted without changing meaning of the sentence
    • can be separated by commas

I got every question correct on Grammar-Monster except for this one:

Select the one with a restrictive modifier in bold:

A. I like it because it’s mine.

B. I like my own ideas mostly.

I picked B because I thought it was essential, which it is, but it’s wrong because it isn’t a modifier. “My own ideas” is the object of “like”, so not a modifier.

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“Mostly” is an adverb modifying “like” so they shouldn’t have bolded it (they shouldn’t be grouped)? I also find “I mostly like my own ideas” more natural. This sentence means the same as the original, right?

I guess they’re taking the modifier view of subordinating clauses since they’re grouping “because” with “it’s mine”. That does make sense given they say that this is a restrictive modifier. I guess “because” is a part of the clause and turns it into an adverb.

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If we take the conjunction view of subordinating conjunctions do we have to deny “because it’s mine” is a restrictive modifier? Or could we still say it modifies “like” or “I like it”?

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Commas vs Parentheses

Justin Mallone (@JustinCEO) claims contradiction between Leonard Peikoff and Elliot:

Commas often go around optional or inessential parts of sentences, including non-restrictive modifiers. They’re sorta like a weaker or milder version of parentheses.

I interpret ET as saying that commas are “weaker” in terms of setting things aside.

So LP says dashes > commas > parens, but I read ET as implying that parens > commas.

Response by curi (@Elliot) :

there’s no disagreement here re comma vs. paren. you should think it through more.

Justin Mallone (@JustinCEO) concludes:

If I read the part of your quote regarding commas being “a weaker or milder version of parentheses” as indicating that commas are weaker than parentheses in terms of indicating that something is a tangent/side-issue, then your quote and what Peikoff says above are totally compatible.

I also read “They’re sorta like a weaker or milder version of parentheses.” as meaning commas set things aside weaker than parentheses do. Parentheses are stronger in indicating something being inessential. Commas don’t side line things as much as parentheses do.

Project Notes

I tracked everything under “Using Commas”, though I probably should have tracked a significant portion under a header like “restrictive and non-restrictive”, but that’s not too important though.

Total time 2:07
grammar trees 2:07
\_ meta 0:12
\_ topics to research 1:55
\\_ using commas 1:55

I read through all the comments on Using Commas. I’m done with the article for now. Not that I’m done with learning about commas, I need to understand them better and practice more for that, but I think it’s enough for now.

I’ll do more sentence tree practice tomorrow. I’ll try to do 4 hours tomorrow to make up for not doing anything yesterday.

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I think that example the dictionary gave is a sentence fragment, and so it’s not a complete sentence.

“I walked past a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying”, would be complete.

So there is a subject and verb missing, for which ‘a hotel’ is the object. But I don’t think you could figure out what they were from the fragment, so it’s not implied. So I think it’s just a fragment. Which makes sense cos the dictionary is just trying to give enough context so you can see how the word you’re interested in is used. That doesn’t always require full sentences.

You could still diagram it as a fragment though, I suppose!

edit: typo

1 Like
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I did consider that, but I think I didn’t write down that concern because I might have quickly dismissed it. I thought since it had a verb, a subject and an object, then it was complete. But that’s only one clause and “a hotel where” is part of another clause. So the sentence isn’t complete.

I think I already had noticed this before. I’ll be more aware of this going forward then!

I don’t really know how to diagram a fragment, so I’ll diagram your example instead.

I learned you can also join two clauses with relative adverbs/pronouns (perhaps I shouldn’t say “join”, but it lets you have two clauses in one sentence). I think I’ll diagram relative adverbs as functioning like adverbs instead of as functioning like conjunctions

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In your example sentence “a hotel” has to be the prepositional object of “past”. We can let “I” be the subject and “reviewed” be the verb such that “a hotel” can be the object in the clause (and remove “past”) . “I reviewed a hotel where the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was staying”

Project Notes

This took 42 minutes and I tracked it under “error correction”, although I could have tracked some of it under “relative pronouns” which was a topic to research. I could still do more reading on relative pronouns/adverbs and take some more notes.

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you just use the normal rules. like for “the red car”, i think you could tree it since the text isn’t convoluted.

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Fire Collection

Exercise sentences:

  • A bird goes into the bird house.
  • Jack and his mom look at each other.

A bird goes into the bird house.

  • goes
    • bird
      • a
    • into
      • house
        • the
        • bird

< 1 min

Second “bird” is an adjective modifying “house”, while the first “bird” is the subject.

Jack and his mom look at each other.

  • look
    • and
      • Jack
      • mom
        • his (Jack’s)
    • at
      • other
        • each

New Oxford Dictionary on “each other”:

pronoun
used to refer to each member of a group when each does something to or for other members: they communicate with each other in French.

The only other dictionary I checked that also had “each other” as an entry was Web3 (also as pronoun).

They don’t have to be a single node though. It just tells us they function together as a pronoun if the use in the sentence matches the definition.

Determining which modifies which was a bit tricky (and probably not too important). I settled with “each” modifying “other” because the determiner definition of “each” makes more sense than the adjective definition of “other”. New Oxford Dictionary:

determiner
used to refer to every one of two or more people or things, regarded and identified separately: each battery is in a separate compartment | each one of us was asked what went on.

adjective
1 denoting a person or thing that is different or distinct from one already mentioned or known about: stick the camera on a tripod or some other means of support | this is our last resort—there’s no other way of reaching an agreement.
• denoting the second of a specified or implied group of two: the other side of the page.
• denoting those remaining in a group or those not already mentioned: they took the other three away in an ambulance.
2 further; additional: one other word of advice.

20 minutes. Almost all the time was spent on deciding which of “other” and “each” should be modifier and modificand. I also got a bit distracted. Probably not worth the

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I can’t tell how my original tree is wrong then. I think “where” has to be a relative adverb.

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Exercises sentences in this post:

  • I like to read comic books.
  • They are fun to read.
  • They make me smile.

I like to read comic books.

  • like
    • I
    • to read
      • books
        • comic

< 1 min

They are fun to read.

  • are
    • they
    • fun
      • to read

1 min

I had to check whether “to” + verb could be adjective infinitives.

They make me smile.

  • make
    • they
    • me
    • smile

I think this definition fits this sentence (New Oxford Dictionary):

3 [with object and infinitive] compel (someone) to do something: she bought me a brandy and made me drink it.

So is “smile” an infinitive (bare infinitive) and “make” and “make” is an auxiliary verb such that it can have “smile” as a child? I remember (not certain) @Elliot having criticisms of the concept of auxiliary verbs (maybe just the terminology because the “main verb” is the child of auxiliary verb), but I can’t remember where he expressed that.

After doing some research I found out “make” in this meaning is called a “causative verb”. Causative verbs can have a bare infinitive as a child. So that solves my problem.

The example sentence from the dictionary:

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I would rearrange the sentence with the implied words I added “she bought a brandy for me and she made me drink it”

36 min.