LMD Sentence Analysis Practise

This is great for getting started. Your answers look good enough to be reasonably useful/functional – nearing intermediate level. In other words, you could probably do a lot of other philosophy work without getting much better at grammar skill.

Besides skill level, using this knowledge to support activities also requires either practice (to automatize most of your grammar knowledge) or identifying key issues and then putting in conscious effort (like making a tree) at those times. Automatization has many advantages for knowledge that will be used often. I don’t know what practice you’ve already done but I find people usually need more – like practicing until it’s not a big deal to do a few more sentences. (Like how, for me, it doesn’t take much effort to review a few sentences someone posts. That doesn’t sound hard or effortful; it sounds routine.)

There are errors. Some are:

I think “to be” is a child of “do have” in sentence 2.

For sentence 3, I don’t understand why you didn’t say what “it” refers to. I think it’d be good to say that. I also think the text “it” refers to, which is plays the subject role, should be nested under “it” or “is”, not put within the complement subtree. It can help to consider a rewrite of the sentence which removes the “it” and puts the words in more standard places, like rewriting “it is [complement] [subject]” to “[subject] is [complement]”. That helps clarify that [subject] isn’t really part of the complement because in the rewrite the complement functions fine (no words seem missing) with the [subject] words removed from it.

Sentence 4:

  • “and” is the prepositional object of “of” which modifies “lots” which is the object of “has”
  • “enough” modifies “defense” not “would have”
  • nothing is specified as the subject of “would have”