Grammar Videos and Peikoff Grammar Course [AM]

ActiveMind · February 26, 2025, 5:34pm

Project Summary

I bought Videos: Grammar and Analyzing Text. I’ll be going through the grammar material in that and Peikoffs grammar course. I’ll do the analyzing lies in a later project.

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 continue to improve my grammar skill, which is useful for text analysis in philosophy. I don’t have some particular grammar skills that I’d like to learn. So the goal is just to go through the grammar material. It’s good to have more specific skills as a goal to learn, but it’s better to do some project and get a bunch of practice on something useful rather than doing nothing.

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’ll spend at least 1 hour each day. I’ll do the project for at least 2 weeks. If I have gone through the grammar material before 2 weeks I’ll do some grammar trees from what I didn’t get to in the last project. I’ll spend a maximum of 6 weeks.

I might not do lecture 7 and 8 from Peikoffs course since those are about writing.

Outline representation of the project in .org format:

* PROJ grammar
** meta
*** TODO project template
*** TODO conclusion
** TODO watch grammar article vidoes
** TODO peikoff course
*** TODO read and take notes
*** TODO first try exercises
*** TODO elliots answers and error correction
** TODO book analysis example videos

I’ll report the time usage on the different tasks like last time.

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 can do the project independently. Help and criticism is appreciated but not necessary. I feel like I’ve moved closer to wanting unbounded criticism, but I’m not there yet. Give me any criticism you think would be helpful given that.

I’m sharing to let others have chance to help, help future learners and build up 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?

My last project failed technically, but I think it was success for my learning. I’ve done two grammar projects already so this should be similar to past successes. That’s part of the reason of why I’m doing it now over other projects. I’m also doing it because I feel my grammar knowledge is incomplete, I’ve been wanting to broaden it.

It took 1 hour doing this planning.

ActiveMind · February 27, 2025, 12:17am

I spent 1 hour and 13 minutes on watching the grammar article videos. I liked them. I didn’t take any notes which I think would’ve been useful. It was a nice refresher on grammar stuff I had learned but I think it would’ve been more useful if I had watched right after reading the article for my first grammar project.

ActiveMind · February 28, 2025, 12:05am

First I watched the grammar tree video for 37 minutes. I liked the part about relative adverbs/pronouns and how to view subordinating conjunctions. I think I’ll rewatch that part. There were some things I didn’t fully catch. The rest was reading Peikoffs course and doing a bit of the exercises.

Notes on Principles of Grammar:

I’m writing the notes to think about what I learn. The notes weren’t written to be read by others, so they might be hard to understand. I had one question at the end which I couldn’t answer myself.

ch. 1

Sentences, Fragments and Run-ons

four types of sentences:

declarative: fact is the case
interrogative: question
imperative: order
exclamatory: “phew!” “aha!”

concept not the same as “complete thought”. a single word is a concept but not a sentence (except “Stop.” and such).

And of course, the key word there is “self-contained,” because if I just say “is open,” that’s not a thought yet, it’s not self-contained, it doesn’t stand by itself. But if I say “The door is open,” then I’ve got a thought.

why isn’t “is open” self-contained? I feel like it’s similar to finite vs infinitive. “the door is open” is limited to some door and tells when it’s open, it’s specific, there aren’t endless possibilities like with “is open”, what is open? could be anything. so in a sense it isn’t self-contained and complete because we can’t think of all the possibilities, we can’t complete that thought. we can use “infinite” things (concepts) in sentences as building blocks, but there has to be some specific sense to it for us to think about it.

sentences express division of thoughts. separates thoughts into neat little boxes. adding in a bunch of extra thoughts separated with commas (as I often do) breaks the definition of a sentence and is therefore not even a bad sentence.

I knew a bit about this already and it has helped me break things into sentence. I think “is this a single thought?”.

subject and predicate

something to talk about + something to say about it = complete thought.

with only something to talk about you just name the thing and what about? what would be the point? there is no content, only a topic. and only something to say, it has to be about something otherwise there is no context, nothing to relate it to. the closest would be a general feeling about everything or life in general like “bad” or “exciting”.

predicate = state, affirm, assert

Many are the days I met him.

seems more poetic than regular english to me.

phrase

grouping. multiple ideas/things combine into one thing. has unity but not a complete thought. complete thoughts have unity, but unity is not enough to make something a complete thought.

isn’t “was jumping up and down” also a phrase? because “up and down” is a modifier on “was”. so that’s the predicate, and the predicate is a phrase, it’s unity is telling the action or linking in the sentence. so “up and down” is a sub-phrase of the phrase “was jumping up and down”. “was jumping” works as a phrase but we didn’t include the whole phrase.

clause

clause has the grammatical components of a sentence: a subject and a predicate. but it’s not a sentence because it’s not a complete thought. so the difference is conceptual, not just mechanical grammar rules. or are there always types of words like “when” to make something from a sentence to a clause?

exercises

When Jack came into the room, he began to remove his coat.

when: sub conj
- came: verb
  - Jack: noun
  - into: prep
    - room: noun
      - the: adj, det
- began: verb
  - he (Jack): pronoun
  - to remove: noun inf
    - coat: noun
      - his: det

when {Jack came <into <the room>>}, {[Jack] began <to remove <his coat>>}

Learning may be easy, if you are learning from a good teacher, but teaching is work.

but: coo conj
- if: sub conj
  - be: verb
    - learning: gerund
    - easy: adj
    - may: adv
  - are: verb
    - you: pronoun
    - learning: gerund
    - from: prep
      - teacher: noun
        
        a: det
        
        good: adj
- is: verb
  - teaching: gerund
  - work: adj inf

{<learning may> be easy}, if {you are <learning <from <a good teacher>>>}, but {teaching is work}

subject/noun

things and concepts (states as well? are states included in concepts?)

only primary means of referring to an aspect of reality

therefore:

the subject […], will be a noun.

or pronoun. or other things that act like nouns. they’re all nouns in a sense. they share some characteristics.

predicate

“smells” and “seems” are linking verbs

no proverbs or verb-equivalents.

verbal

not the action actually happening, usually is the concept of the verb.

modifier

describe, limit or qualify.

adverbs functioning as conjunctions: “so”, “when”. I didn’t think of it like that. I just thought of them as adverbs. but it’s quite clear with “when” that it’s not just joining things, it’s also telling us about timing. so the extra thing it tells is like a modifier. Elliot said something about this in the grammar tree video.

I went home for dinner

I thought “home” would be a noun. I thought it was a kinda shortcut to leave out “to my” so that would be:

I went to my home for dinner

but that would be a prepositional phrase, so acting as an adverb, might as well just treat “home” as an adverb in itself.

oh, that was exactly what happened!

If you wanted to make it a noun, you’d have to say “I went to my home.” […] Originally it was a noun. So it’s a shorthand noun functioning as an adverb.

I think it help to understand what it used to be because it seems more in line with the rules. “I went home” seems more like an exception.

complement and object

Elliot mentioned objects were complements, but complements are not objects. objects are the sub-group. that makes sense since we can have action verbs without an object, but some action verbs require the object. otherwise it’s not complete, so therefore the object is a complement.

It was too close for comfort

initially I thought “for comfort” would modify “was”, but it makes more sense to modify “close”. It doesn’t make sense without the “too” though. is “too” a complement then? “it was close” and “it was too close” both work so “too” wouldn’t be a complement. actually “it was close for comfort” works, but feels a little weird. the meaning is totally different so I didn’t detect that it worked.

It says the mouse was darting up the wall. But strictly, it doesn’t say the mouse was darting up the wall; it says the mouse escaped.

because “escaped” was the only verb.

You can’t think to yourself, “Well, it really tells you how it escaped, because it escaped by just darting up the wall.”

that was what I thought to myself.

The form of the words requires you to interpret it that way

right, the grammar tells us how we should interpret it. this makes it more objective.

“She put a pie into the oven to bake.” “To bake” is a phrase, an infinitive, and what action does it describe? It’s the purpose of the action. Now, I know that it might seem odd that the purpose is an adverb and the mechanism is an adjective

I don’t understand what is meant by “the mechanism is an adjective.” I think “to bake” modifies “put.” we could add “in order” to get a prepositional phrase.

Project Notes

Total time	4:13
grammar	4:13
\_meta		0:09
\_ watch grammar vidoes		0:37
\_ peikoff course		3:27
\\_ read and take notes			3:07
\\_ first try exercises			0:20

Dface · February 28, 2025, 1:15am

If “to bake” is an adverb and is the purpose of “put”, then theres gotta be an adjective in the sentence that is “the mechanism.”

I only see the adjectives “a” and “the” in the sentence.

Is “into the oven” the adjective? I thought it was an adverb modifying “put.”

What does mechanism mean here? The definition and what is meant in the sentence. Maybe that will help to find what Peikoff is saying

Elliot · February 28, 2025, 3:13pm

A sentence can have one clause or multiple clauses. Using multiple clauses generally involves conjunctions. Many sentences are one clause long. Nothing extra is needed besides one clause to form a sentence.

“to bake” is the purpose. It’s the reason for the putting.

The mechanism is how you achieve the purpose. I think that’d refer to “put” (verb) or maybe “into the oven” (adverb) or “oven” (noun). I don’t see adjectives here besides “a” and “the”. So I think Peikoff made an error. Maybe he thought “into the oven” modified “pie”?

Reading the next post after writing the above, I see that @Dface agrees with me.

ActiveMind · February 28, 2025, 11:15pm

Doing exercises for the first lecture. Some nesting/levels got messed up when I copied from bullet points into MindNode, which is why I took so much time on meta today.

When Jack came into the room, he began to remove his coat.

“A wise move” modifies “began” or “to remove”. I think it makes more sense to modify the verb, since that’s the action. it was wise of him to begin.

Coming into the room, Jack began to remove his coat.

wrong:

this is the same as the “darting up the wall, the mouse escaped”. so I still have that mentality of thinking about what’s happening instead of the grammar.

final:

<Jack <coming <into <the room>>>> began <to remove <his coat>>

Italy owes a historic debt to her great sculptors. A debt she can never repay.

wrong:

I would translate this back to a sentence as:

She can never repay a debt.

is there a way to make the tree unambiguously represent the original sentence? so I think the clue is that these two sentences were given together (and an explanation of appositives are given right under.) so “a debt” is refering to the debt Italy has to her great sculptors. “A debt” is an appositive modifying “debt” in the first sentence, then “she can never repay” is adjectival clause modifying “debt” in the second sentence. the second sentence isn’t really a complete thought then, but neither was “a wise move.”

however this has a verb modifying a noun, so need a way to connect them. they’re connected with an implied that/which.

final:

Learning may be easy, if you are learning from a good teacher, but teaching is work.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

I had it like this to start with:

tricky.

It is not enough that a man do the right thing, that his acts be in accord with duty; the moral man must act from duty; he must do his duty simply because it is his duty.

I was uncertain about “duty”, a noun, being the subject complement for “it is.” Then I checked “to rule is his prerogative”:

another example is “he is a policeman.”

project notes

I also listened to the first Peikoff lecture while doing other things.

Time table for today:

Total time	3:30
grammar	3:30
\_ meta		0:41
\_ peikoff course		2:49
\\_ listen in background			0:54
\\_ first try exercises			1:55

Elliot · March 1, 2025, 4:47pm

I don’t think “coming” modifies “Jack”. I don’t think it’s telling us the type of Jack. I don’t think it’s a coming-into-the-room-Jack that began to remove his coat. I think it provides context for the whole clause and the action, not just information about Jack.

It’s not a sentence. It’s a fragment.

ActiveMind · March 1, 2025, 5:16pm

Is “coming into the room” acting as an adverb then? How could it do that? Could we not think of it as describing Jack like it would in “Jack, who was coming into the room.”

What about:

Darting up the wall, the mouse escaped.

Would you say “darting up the wall” provides information about the mouse or the whole clause and action (or something else?)

Ah, I thought fragment was anything that was not a full sentence. So a fragment has a beginning capital letter and a period (or other punctuation,) but it’s not a complete thought and therefore not a sentence.

ActiveMind · March 1, 2025, 9:08pm

In my “coming” node I added “(-ing ending can never be inf)”. But -ing endings can mean participle. I had forgotten that I have already figured out that participles can not only act as adjectives, but also as adverbs:

I don’t think “screaming” is modifying “she” in that example. What about:

Screaming, she ran out of the room.

Still seems like “screaming” is modifying “ran” rather than “she.”

You disagree with Peikoff then:

So “Coming into the room” is a participial phrase, functioning in this case as an adjective modifying “Jack.”

I’m not sure what to think myself (then I wrote the stuff below and I now lean towards Peikoff being mistaken.) I think the “darting up the wall” example gives more sense the way Peikoff thinks of it, but it might be that he thinks that participles can’t act as adverbs, that they can’t modify verbs.

If we take:

Darting up the wall, the mouse escaped.

We could rewrite it as:

The mouse darting up the wall escaped.

That sounds natural. “Darting” would clearly modify “mouse.” But rewriting:

Coming into the room, Jack began to remove his coat.

To:

Jack coming into the room began to remove his coat.

Doesn’t sound as good. In that case I want commas around “coming into the room.” In which case it seems to give context for the whole clause and action, like you said.

ActiveMind · March 1, 2025, 9:22pm

Exercise 6 and 7 used “that” (explicit and implicit) and relative adverbs, so I watched the “that”, relative pronouns and subordinating conjunctions part of the grammar tree article for 46 minutes. Here was my notes:

on “subordinating conjunctions”:
I didn’t understand why view 3, the mix of view 1 and view 2, was contradictory until I watched this video. so, it’s contradictory because they’re trying to say that only “I drink white milk” is the main clause while “while tall John quickly eats really great cookies” is modifying “drink”. if “while…” modifies “drink” then it’s a part of the clause headed by “drink”, so it would be part of the main clause. but they say it’s not part of the main clause, but instead that it’s a “subordinate clause” instead of just an adverbial clause modifying “milk.”

I think [that] school is boring.

why not just put “school is boring” as the child of “that” and treat “that” as a relative pronoun?

ActiveMind · March 1, 2025, 9:50pm

This was the Taggart Terminal, she thought, this room, not the giant concourse in New York—this was her goal, the end of track, the point beyond the curve of the earth where the two straight lines of rail met and vanished, drawing her forward—as they had drawn Nathaniel Taggart—this was the goal Nathaniel Taggart had seen in the distance and this was the point still holding the straight-line glance of his lifted head above the spiral motion of men in the granite concourse.

At first I tried to treat all this as a single tree (outline, missing details):

I tried many different things, no implied “;,” no implied “and,” more implied "that"s and an implied “that” as a relative pronoun on “point.”

Then I read this from Peikoff’s answer (I didn’t read more of Peikoffs answer than this):

Note that there are dashes, and dashes tell you that the grammar starts over. Miss Rand could have put a period there and started again, but she wants the reader to take in the whole thing in one gulp in order to get the overall emotional effect, not break it up into separate units, so she deliberately keeps it going, and that’s the function of a dash.

I knew dashes had a grammatical effect, but I thought it would just modify some words in the main sentence. I don’t know why I didn’t look up what dashes did before so late (I read that quote by searching “dash” in the book.)

Here are the different trees:

Here’s an interesting thing: “not”, an adverb, modifying “concourse”, a noun. The reason I think this works is that “concourse” is heading an appositive phrase, which is acting as an adjective modifying “this”. So as an adjective it should be able to be modified by an adverb. It’s saying: here’s a detail about “this”, except this detail says what “this” is not.

I’m uncertain about “drawing” modifying “lines.” Take:

the lines drawing her forward

Here “drawing” can definitely function as a participle modifying “lines.” But in:

the lines, drawing her forward

It feels more like “drawing” is acting as verb and not a verbal. But I couldn’t fit in “drawing” as a verb in my tree so I just put it as a participle modifying “lines.”

It was fun figuring things out on such a challenging sentence (though it probably would have been way easier if I knew how dashes worked), but I spent like 1 hour and 50 minutes on it which is not efficient.

Time table for today:

Total time	3:53
grammar	3:53
\_ meta		0:34
\_ watch grammar vidoes		0:46
\_ peikoff course		2:33
\\_ first try exercises			1:53
\\_ elliots and peikoffs answers and error correction			0:40

ActiveMind · March 1, 2025, 11:33pm

Now I’m wondering if “enough” is the subject complement in “it is not enough.” I’ll look into that tomorrow. I’m not certain what to do with the "that"s then. They’ll probably be relative adverbs modifying “enough” though.

Also I’ve been wondering why I’m putting the auxiliary verbs as the root of their clauses. I think there was a reason for it but I can’t remember. I’ll look into that tomorrow as well.

The reason I’m wondering is that many auxiliary verbs seem to be for forming a tense. That makes me think it’s modifying the main verb, which is the interesting verb of the clause. There are also sub-classes of auxiliary verbs, such as modal verbs, which give some extra meaning, so acting more like a modifier.

The structure I have now is usually the subject and the main verb are the children of the auxiliary while the object is the child of the main verb. In the other view I’m thinking of the subject and object would both be the children of the main verb while the auxiliary is a modifier on the main verb.

ActiveMind · March 2, 2025, 11:24pm

Continuing exercises from homework 1:

John Smith, my uncle, was very famous.

was
- John Smith
  - uncle
    - my
- famous
  - very

My uncle, J. Smith, the author of Destiny, was famous.

was
- uncle
  - my
  - J. Smith
  - author
    - the
    - of
      - Destiny
- famous

The word “ain’t” is not in good repute.

is: verb
- word: subj
  - the: det
  - “ain’t”: noun, app
- in: prep, adj, comp
  - repute: noun
    - good: adj

The word “ain’t” is not in good repute.

is: verb
- idea: obj
  - the: det
  - that: rel pronoun, app
    - is: verb
      - wealth: subj
      - important: adj, comp
- true: adj, comp

Identify any errors in the use of modifiers.

The bell sounded loudly and clearly, and still waters run deeply, but even so I feel real well.

“Still” ambiguous whether it applies to “waters” or “run.” Instead write “the still waters run,” or “the waters still run.” Also using “real” as adverb is informal according to New Ox, so that’s probably one mistake Peikoff thought of.

but: conj
- and: conj
  - sounded: verb
    - bell: subj
      - the: det
    - and: conj, adv
      - loudly: adv
      - clearly: adv
  - run: verb
    - waters: noun
    - deeply: adv
- feel: verb
  - I: subj
  - well: adj
    - real: adv
- even: adv
  - so: adv

I think “even so” is fine. New Ox has “even so” as a phrase:

even so
in spite of that; nevertheless: not the most exciting of places, but even so I was having a good time.

So it’s modifying the meaning of “but.”

Where vacation dissatisfaction existed, advance recreation planning had been insignificant— a problem particularly acute among mathematics students who forget basic philosophy principles.

I think using “vacation” as adjective is fine here, like it is in “vacation home.” The dash seems to make the third clause, “a problem particularly acute” modify everything before the dash, or just “had.” Maybe that’s the error? I can’t see any other possible errors.

had: aux verb
- planning: subj
  - advance: adj
  - recreation: adj
- been: main verb
  - insignificant: adj, comp
- where: rel adv
  - existed: verb
    - dissatisfaction: subj
      - vacation: adj
acute: verb
- problem: subj
  - a: det
- among: prep
  - students: noun
    - mathematics: adj
    - who: rel pronoun
      - forget: verb
        
        principles: noun
        
        basic: adj
        
        philosophy: adj

Newspaper headline: Macmillan refuses bank rate rise leak probe.

“Bank rate rise leak probe” is certainly confusing. It seems “leak” is the adjective of “probe.” And that seems to mean the newspaper had some early information on the bank rate rise (not entirely sure that’s what “leak probe” means.) “Bank” modifies “rate” to make a “bank rate”, which there is a New Ox entry for. “Bank rate” modifies “rise”, it tells us what type of “rise” Macmillan refused, a rise of bank rates.

refuses: verb
- Macmillian: subj
- rise: obj
  - rate: noun, adj
    - bank: adj
- leak: noun
  - probe: noun

So “leak probe” doesn’t fit in because they’re nouns trying to be adverbs. I think “bank rate rise” should be “rise in bank rate” such that “rate” can act only as a noun.

Took 57 minutes and that’s all for today.

ActiveMind · March 3, 2025, 8:54pm

I watched Peikoff Grammar Exercises 1 by Elliot. Elliot didn’t know much about prepositions and conjunctions at the time, so I couldn’t really find errors in my own work using this. I think the exercises are way too hard for someone who had only listened to one grammar lecture. Peikoff wasn’t asking the students to make trees like I did, he asked the students to parse, or figure out the parts of speech. The thing is you kind of have to make something tree-equivalent in your head, you have to figure out what modifies what because that changes what part of speech things are. By using trees I changed my mind that some things were relative pronouns when they really were relative adverb. I think Peikoff should’ve given a high quantity of easier exercises, and then these as bonus, especially 5, 6 and 7.

The value was mostly in seeing how Elliot used it to learn. How he dealt with lots of things being outside his current knowledge and just taking what was useful to him. He wouldn’t waste time on things that were too difficult. So it’s goal based learning, not just do whatever the teacher told you. Even if Peikoff hadn’t covered conjunctions and relative pronouns/adverbs Elliot could just parse the other stuff and thus have something to relate Peikoff’s analysis in lecture 2.

ActiveMind · March 3, 2025, 8:56pm

Homework 1 error correction

I think this is correct. It looks like this:

I got uncertain whether the prepositional phrase “in accord with duty” is acting as an adjective and subject complement or as an adverb. The difference may not matter.

I didn’t find other errors by doing a quick overview. I’ll just read lecture 2 and error correct when Peikoff analyzes the sentences.

Project notes

Watching the video and looking for errors took 1 hour. I’ll research about auxiliary verbs tomorrow and start on lecture 2.

ActiveMind · March 5, 2025, 12:21am

Homework 1 error correction

“Feel” is not the verb of “touching,” but merely indicates how I am, i.e., my state. And therefore, it should be “I feel good.

New Ox thinks “well” can function as an adjective when it’s a complement (that’s what I think “[predicative]” means):

adjective (better, best) [predicative]
1 in good health; free or recovered from illness: I don’t feel very well

“Vacation” is not an adjective. “Vacation dissatisfaction” does not communicate anything, except if you guess that he means “dissatisfaction with your vacation.”

I don’t agree. That would mean “baseball hat” isn’t grammatical because “baseball” isn’t an adjective. Should we start writing “hat of baseball,” or “hat for baseball”?
New Ox on “baseball”:

[as modifier] : a baseball player.

I think we can solve it by saying that “baseball” and “vacation” are appositives. Maybe those don’t meet the qualification of being an appositive but I don’t know yet. (later: I still don’t know they aren’t just considered appositives)

you commit an essential violation of the nature of language because you’re putting two substantives together.

Now, generally speaking, an appositive is defined as “a substantive directly following a substantive and used to elaborate or explain it.”

I could see how “noun pileup” would be bad if it’s done excessively. like lots of nouns without breaks could pileup in your mind and make it hard to think. But I think “mathematics students” and “philosophy principles” are fine.

This might be a thing that changed since Peikoff’s time. Maybe “vacation home” wasn’t considered grammatically correct back then. I think it’s now.

While reading I see that Peikoff would probably agree that “vacation home” and “baseball hat” are okay:

Fowler recognizes that, so he cannot make a rule that two nouns together are always wrong. Fowler writes: “There is nothing new in putting a noun to this use,” that is, adjective use, “when no convenient adjective is available. Examples abound in everyday speech. ‘Government department,’

Why, for instance, should we speak of an ‘enemy attack,’ when we have the adjective ‘hostile’? Or a ‘luxury hotel,’ when we have the adjective ‘luxurious’? Or a ‘novelty number,’ when we have the adjective ‘novel’?

I agree with that. Use proper adjectives instead of nouns when you can.

“Nursery school” is legitimate, but what about “nursery school provision”? That’s a three-parter. And as he puts it, this is an ugly and obscure way of saying “provision of nursery school.”

Three-parters feels awkward. I can see that with “advance recreation planning,” it felt unusual but I couldn’t really say it was a mistake because I thought noun pileup was okay.

What about “a large vehicle fleet”? That is really typical of the noun pileup, “large” being an adjective, and then “vehicle fleet.” That is intrinsically ambiguous, because it could mean “a fleet of large vehicles,” or “a large fleet of vehicles.” A typical way that people write today and commit this error is to stick two nouns together with some kind of adjective, and it becomes impossible to know to which element in the pileup the adjective applies.

That’s definitely ambiguous writing! OK, so avoid noun pileups when possible, especially when you’re using adjectives on one of the nouns.

But the noun adjective, useful in its proper place, is now running riot and corrupting the language,” which is a modest statement if you read what comes out of modern psychology or modern educators.

Noun pileup seems more normalized now, so it probably didn’t stand out to me as much it would have for Peikoff. I definitely felt it on “bank rate rise leak probe,” but the others didn’t seem that bad. Only the three-parter “advance recreation planning” felt off to me, “vacation dissatisfaction” a bit as well.

58 minutes.

ActiveMind · March 5, 2025, 12:26am

lecture two notes

subordination and coordination

The other types of clauses are simply like adjectives, adverbs, or nouns within the main clause.

so Peikoff is a proponent of view 2 of subordinating conjunctions?

“what” can mean “that which” or “the thing that”.

fragment

part of the previous sentence.
use for emphasis.
gives an extra pause. kinda manipulating the experiences of reading.

direct and indirect object

I didn’t know a verb could have two objects, a direct one and an indirect one through a prepositional phrase.

so an object often plays one of two roles: what is acted upon, whom is acted upon. thing or recipient. so it makes sense we sometimes want to both specify the thing that given and whom it is given to.

with preposition put the direct object first, but the preposition can be implied if we put the indirect object before the direct object.

appositives

so I had “that” as relative pronoun in “the idea that wealth is true.” before I would just think of it as an adjective phrase, but Peikoff says it’s not. If “that” isn’t a relative pronoun then what is it?

“Not the giant concourse in New York.” “The giant concourse” is a noun following the “This,” but it’s negated. So you could call this a negative appositive. What part of speech is “not”? “The egg he did not eat,” the “not” tells you something very crucial about the action, namely, that it didn’t happen, so it’s an adverb.

so Peikoff agrees that “concourse” is an appositive and that “not” is adverb. so why not say that appositives act as adjectives and can therefore take adverbs?

So here, “that wealth is important” is an appositive noun clause. It’s not an adjective, because to be an adjective, it would have to have a different construction; it would have to be like this: “The idea, which I told you yesterday, is true.” Then you’re describing to me an attribute of the idea. But here you’re telling me what the idea is by giving me a substantive. This could stand by itself, but an adjective couldn’t.

Peikoff says it’s about adjectives being attributes. “that wealth is important” is describing what “the idea” is. describing is a thing modifiers does. adjectives do describe but it seems like it’s always describing an attribute. hmm, I think this isn’t too important of a grammar detail tho.

But in this case, the “that” is not a subject or an object. It does not function as a pronoun but as a pure conjunction.

how would you tree that?

is: verb
- that: conj
  - idea: subj (should be subj of “is”)
    - the
  - is: verb
    - wealth: subj
    - true: comp

doesn’t work. one has to take the “relater view”

is: verb
- idea: subj
  - the: det
  - that: conj “relater”
    - is: verb
      - wealth: subj
      - true: comp

isn’t it better to just think of “that” as a relative pronoun then? I guess it’s not an appositive then.

I think of pronouns being a subset of nouns and relative pronouns, and that they inherit the attributes of their parents. so in that sense relative pronouns could be viewed as appositives.

project notes

Total time	2:17
grammar videos and peikoff course	2:17
\_ peikoff course		2:17
\\_ read and take notes			1:19
\\_ error correction			0:58

I still didn’t research auxiliary verbs much. Peikoff mentions auxiliary in the book but it seems like he doesn’t cover the topic. I think I’ll just continue with the way I’m doing it now and I’ll consider researching it after the course.

ActiveMind · March 6, 2025, 12:35am

Homework 1 error correction

What is the predicate? Technically, the predicate is “may.

“Be” is an infinitive, not a regular verb. I didn’t recognize that “may” was a verb. It’s a modal verb, a.k.a an auxiliary verb. “Easy” is still the complement of “be”, but “learning” should be the subject of “may.”

“if you are learning”? Is that a gerund? No, it’s part of the verb.

I’m not sure. “Learning” seems to be describing a state. “From a good teacher” modifies that state, the state of learning from a good teacher. So this clause and the main clause would say: learning may be easy when you are in the state of learning from a good teacher. So I would still say that “learning” is a participle here.

What part of speech is “work”? It’s a noun.

I thought complements for “be” had to be adjectives, later I found out they could be nouns as well. I agree that “work” is a noun here, not a noun infinitive either.

What is the first main clause? Not “It is not enough,” because “It” is not part of the grammar of this sentence. “It” is one of those empty filler words that starts you off, which we call expletives.

So I didn’t really know how to tree expletives. So what Peikoff want is actually close to what I had originally. Originally I thought there was both an object and a complement, which would be two complements, doesn’t make sense. Now “that” is the subject and there is no object, only a complement.

Here is what that part looks like now:

The expletive “it” may also just be left out.

predicate, “be,”

this time it seems like “be” could be normal verb. I think it’s correct but I don’t know why, maybe just old language, it feels a bit archaic.

It doesn’t say, “She thought that this was the Taggart Terminal.” If it read that way, then “She thought” would be the main clause. But in this case, “she thought” actually functions as an aside, a parenthesis; it simply indicates that this is going on in her mind, but it’s not part of the structure of the grammar.

If there isn’t an implied “that” then “she thought” doesn’t fit into the tree, which is what Peikoff says when he says “it’s not part of the structure of the grammar.”
With implies “that” is awkward:

This was the Taggart Terminal, she thought that, this room, not the giant concourse in New York -

Usually the implied “that” sounds natural, so in this case maybe it’s better to just put the “she thought” to the side.

“Drawing her forward” is simply a participial phrase modifying “lines.”

OK. Sounds a bit weird, but it works.

What type of clause is “where the two straight lines of rail met and vanished”? It’s the point where all this happens; it’s an adjective clause, that’s all.

According to New Ox “where” can be a relative adverb, not a relative pronoun. So I think it’s an adverbial clause which modifies an appositive. Not really important though. It modifies the same thing

Project notes

Took 52 minutes.

After taking notes on cycling between CF and its prerequisites I have changed my mind on the value of this project now. I know I’ll definitely not do lecture 7 and 8 of Peikoffs course. I might end it sooner than that. I’ll decide tomorrow.

Elliot · March 6, 2025, 4:18pm

I’ve found it most helpful to focus on what is a “finite” verb and what isn’t (non-finite verb), rather than regular, modal, auxiliary and other terminology.

Lots of grammar sources, including Peikoff, have a different point of view that doesn’t actually contradict me about which verbs are finite or non-finite, but that’s not their focus and sometimes they don’t even consider it when I would.

Example: “John is a tall man.”

ActiveMind · March 6, 2025, 5:46pm

I’ll read nonfinite verbs and take notes on it.

Here is the “later” I was talking about.