Grammar tree practice [AM]

[ActiveMind]

@ActiveMind

Fire Collection

Exercises sentences in this post:

• I read them in the morning.
• I read them in the afternoon.
• I read them at night.
• I read even them when I go camping.
• Comic books are great to read.
• I planted a tree last spring.

First attempt

I read them in the morning.

• read
  • I
  • them
  • in
    • morning
      • the

< 1 min

I read them in the afternoon

• read
  • I
  • them
  • in
    • afternoon
      • the

20 sec

I read them at night

• read
  • I
  • them
  • at
    • night

15 sec

I even read them when I go camping

• when
  • read
    • I
    • them
    • even
  • go
    • I
    • camping

1 min 15 sec

Comic books are great to read

• are
  • books
    • comic
  • great to read

I’m not sure about how to diagram “great to read”. It doesn’t make sense part of speech wise to say that “to read”, a noun infinitive, modifies “great”, an adjective. Unless “to read” can function like an adverb. My research lead me to find out about adjective complements. So “to read” complements “great” and should therefore be its child.

• are
  • books
    • comic
  • great
    • to read

30 min

I think this was a good explanation:

@Fire

“To read” is an adjective that modifies “great”. It qualifies what is “great” about the “books”.

But doesn’t something that modifies an adjective have to be an adverb though? It seems so:

@Fire

So, “to read” must be an adverb.

I planted a tree last spring

I think “last” should modify “spring”, but what should “spring” be the child of then? It feels like it should be modifying “planted” as if it was an adverb or preposition. I think the sentence “I planted a tree in the last spring” means the same. So can I assume “in” and “the” are implied?

• planted
  • I
  • tree
    • a
  • [in]
    • spring
      • [the]
      • last

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English seems to suggest that “in” shouldn’t be used with “last”, but it doesn’t mention “in” and “the” together with “last”. “In the last spring” sounds more natural to me than “in last spring”, although it sounds a bit clunky.

“In The Last Year” vs. “Last Year” vs. “In The Past Year” (+Preposition Guide):

Knowing the difference between “in the last year,” “last year,” and “in the past year” isn’t that difficult. All three phrases are the same,

So “last spring” and “in the last spring” means the same. I think I’ll conclude my implied words are OK.

21 min.

Fire used “during” instead of “in” and “the”. “During last spring” also means the same as “in the last spring” in this sentence (in general too? At first I thought “during” couldn’t describe something happening at particular point of time, but it can describe something happening at a particular point of time which is within another stretch of time).

@Elliot

Here’s the process I used for analyzing the tricky part of this sentence:

1. Notice there’s an issue (there appear to be two nouns after the verb)
2. Consider if one of the nouns could be an indirect object.
3. Come up with a couple reasons it’s not an indirect object.
4. Look up “last” and “spring” in a dictionary.
5. Web search something like “last spring grammar”.
6. Skim a relevant forum topic this which linked to a different dictionary entry.
7. Conclude it’s a special case. The dictionary gave some rules for when to omit a preposition but gave no conceptual explanation. So I don’t know why exactly but I concluded that this sentence simply doesn’t follow standard grammar rules. Adding an implied preposition in the tree to fix it is fine.

I didn’t do #2 and #3 and I sort of did #7, I didn’t really say it was a special case and I didn’t find a dictionary that gave rules for when to omit preposition. I did exactly #1, #4, #5 and #6.

Project Notes

Time table for today:

Total time	1:33
grammar tree practice	1:33
\_ meta		0:14
\_ grammar tree exercise collections		1:19
\\_ first attempt at exercises			1:19

I’ve only done approximately 5 hours 30 minutes for the last 4 days. It should be around 8-12 hours for 4 days. So I’ll have to pick it up from now on.