Grammar tree practice [AM]

ActiveMind · December 17, 2024, 11:12am

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