GOAL: Just to put a bit more of my thinking on the forum. I wrote this with the thought of practicing thinking out loud and finding errors and gaps in my thinking.
CONTEXT: I wanted to try a free-write version of Feynmann’s blank sheet method for grammar and text analysis.
Free write about Grammar and Text Analysis:
Grammar analysis is part of text analysis.
How does grammar help?
Grammar analysis helps you understand the relationship between words in a sentence. The parts of the sentence that you are trying to understand are the verb, the subject, the object or compliment, modifiers, and conjunctions (in the case of complex/compound sentences). The verb is the best thing to look for first. As you identify the verb you simultaneous identify whether it is an action verb or linking verb. Finding the verb helps split the sentence in half with the first half being the part of the sentence that contains the subject.
Once you have identified the verb and the subject, you look at the subject’s relationship to the rest of words following the verb. If you have a linking verb, you are looking for a sort of equivalency connection between the subject and the complement. The complement can be a noun or an adjective. In the case of adjective complements, the complement can be an aspect, an attribute, or a subset of subject. Noun complements establish a bit more of an equivalency with the subject.
Modifiers of words are often right next to the word they modify and proximity is a good clue, even when there is word separation between modifier and modified. Other than in the case of adjective complements, it helps to look for subject modifiers in the first half of the sentence, as delimited by the verb.
How does grammar fit into text analysis?
Spotting verbs quickly helps you quickly identify the clauses within a sentence. In text analysis, the clauses may be broken apart as separate nodes. The type of verb in sentence gives a big clue about some of the goals of the sentence. Linking verbs can indicate sentences that have a goal of defining something or relating an aspect of something to something else, e.g. relating a concept to an example.
Some additional understanding of verbs, like modal verbs or auxiliary verbs, helps to further clarify the relationship between subject and object/complement. The modal or auxiliary further qualifies the defining relationship between the subject and the rest of the sentence.
For relationships between sentences, you can try to identify whether a subject from a prior sentence is the subject in a following sentence. Or, whether the object or complement of a prior sentence is the subject of the next sentence. Those could be indicators that the follow up sentence is detailing or defining some term or concept from the prior sentence.
Word repetition is a big help in seeing the connection between sentences. The repeated word is can be a concept or idea that being expanded upon. The types of words used to expand upon a subject show something about the inter-sentence relationship. Modifiers on the expand concept show that a sentence is adding details or qualifiers to the concept. That means the sentence is trying to narrow down to a more exact concept. A qualifying sentence acts similar to a modifier word in that is helps classify and categorize which ideas we are talking about and which ones we’re not talking about.