sem_7_Trees-d

30/10/2012 АН/АФ

Seminar No. 7. Sentence structure and its visual representations in grammar.

Read the explanation about a sentence structure and its visual representations in grammar. Get ready to act as a research assistant – using the three ways of grammar structure analysis prepare your own one.

A sentence seen as a complex structure that may be presented as a number of discrete language units can get its pictorial representation in a form of a sentence diagram. Below you will find the information about three, the most accepted ways – a Reed-Kellogg diagram, an Immediate Constituent structure (IC-analysis), a Phrase-structure Tree.

Reed-Kellogg diagrams. Diagramming is visual maps commonly used in schoolroom traditional grammar to display the structure of a simple sentence (subject + predicate + object – if any). In the 19^th century a number of different styles of diagramming evolved, but the system, still used in many schools today, was the one developed by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg prior to the turn of the century (1877).

In Reed-Kellogg diagrams, the main horizontal line represents the core of the sentence called the base. The subject position filler stands on the left, the predicate – on the right, separated by a vertical bar which extends through the base. The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb requires permits or precludes other clause elements to complete the predication. The verb and its object (if any) are separated by a line that ends at the baseline. If the object is a direct object, the line is vertical. If the verb is followed by a predicate noun or adjective, the line looks like a backslash, sloping toward the subject.

Because no competing systems have survived, Reed-Kellogg diagramming is usually referred to simply as diagramming. Below you may see diagramming of the sentence Those tall trees framed our lovely view nicely.

Pic. 1. A Sample Reed-Kellogg diagram.

A vertical line intersects the horizontal between the main words of the subject, Those tall trees, and the main words of the predicate, framed our lovely view nicely. A vertical line following the verb framed, separates it on the horizontal plane from the main word of its direct object, view. Diagonal lines point toward modifying words. Notice that the noun modifiers those and tall are on diagonals below trees; the adverb nicely is on a diagonal below the verb framed; and the modifiers our and lovely are on diagonal below the noun view.

Modifiers of the subject, predicate, or object are placed below the base. Adjectives, articles, adverbs etc. are placed on slanted lines below the word they modify. Prepositional phrases are also placed beneath the word they modify; the preposition goes on a slanted line and slanted line leads to a horizontal line on which the object of the preposition is placed.

Compound subjects, predicates, objects, etc. are drawn as multiple horizontal lines stacked vertically, joined at each end by a fan of a diagonal lines; the coordinating conjunction goes on a vertical line through the left ends of the horizontal lines.

Prepositional phrases form two lines: the preposition itself is drawn just as the one for a modifying word would, it hangs down below the antecedent, and the line for a complement is drawn protruding horizontally from a point near the bottom of the line (For more information: http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser).

This mode of diagramming is still in use when the person thinks it helps clarify a grammatical concept.

Immediate constituent analysis. One of the most widely used techniques for displaying sentence is the use of Immediate constituent analysis (IC Analysis), firstly introduced by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933), it presents the basics of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics.

In IC analysis a sentence is divided up into major divisions (or ‘immediate constituents’), and these constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents, the process continues until irreducible language units are received, i.e. until each clause constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word. The final result of IC analysis is often presented in a visual diagrammatic form that reveals the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of a sentence. For sentences with unusual structure this analysis may be excessively complex, ut Bloomfield doesn’t give ant special technique to detect the constituents, he rather appeals to the native speaker’s intuition.

This approach works through the different levels of structure within a sentence in a series of steps. At each level a construction is divided into its major constituents, and the process continues until no further divisions can be made.

For example, for an IC analysis of the sentence ‘The girl chased the dog’ we should carry out the following steps:

1) Identify the two major constituents – the girl // chased the dog;

2) Divide the next – biggest constituent into two - chased / the dog;

3) Continue dividing constituents into two until we can go no further – the/girl///chase/ed//the/dog.

IC-analysis, used to represent the hierarchical structure of sentences and their parts, was a tool developed by American structural linguists. They employed several different graphic devices to represent the results of IC-analysis.

Pic. 2. A Sample IC-analysis diagram.

Those	tall	trees	framed	our	lovely	view	nicely

The version in Pic. 2 uses arrows to show how words and phrases are modified. Those, for example, modifies tall trees, and tall modifies trees. The vertical line between trees and framed divides the subject from the predicate, and the vertical between framed and our lovely view divides the verb from its object.

Working upward from the bottom, you can see how phrases contained within the sentence form its parts. The first vertical divides the entire subject, those tall trees, from the entire predicate, framed our lovely view nicely. Each of these, in turn, is divided into the parts that constitute it – parts considered to be its constituents. The subject, for instance, has two major constituents, those and tall trees. Tall trees have two constituents. The predicate is analysed first into two components framed our lovely view and nicely; then a verb is separated from its direct object, which can be divided into two components twice. The advantage of IC-analysis is that it allows to visualize a hierarchy of relations within a word group and layers of modification.

Phrase Structure Tree. The phrase structure tree diagrams (also called phrase markers), used in transformational generative grammar, show some relationships more clearly than through Reed-Kellogg diagramming or immediate constituency analysis boxes. This mode of analysis is very popular in analysing complex syntactic structures. Language’s syntax is decoded through the phrase-structure rules. The latter are used to break a natural language sentence down into its constituent parts – the noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc. (also known as syntactic categories). Phrase structure rules were commonly used in transformational grammar and were adapted in computer science.

The basic rule in phrase structure analysis is the A → B C, meaning that the constituent A is separated into two subconstituents B and C. The most universal rules for natural English or Russian are:

S → NP VP

NP → det N1

N1 → (AP) N1 (PP)

The first rule reads: An S consists of an NP followed by a VP (A sentence consists of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase). Could you read the other two rules presented in the structure formula?

A good way of putting more information into an analysis would be to name, or label, the elements that emerge each time a sentence is segmented. It would be possible to use functional labels such as ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’, but the approach that is more widely practised has developed its own terminology and abbreviations.

Pic. 3. A Sample phrase structure of a sentence.

		S
	NP		V P
		mVG
		│	N G
det	H	mV	det	H
│	│	│	│	│
art	n	v	art	n
the	girl	chased	the	dog

If we start segmentation of the sentence ‘The girl chased the dog ’, the first division produces a ‘noun phrase’ (NP) the girl and a ‘verb phrase’ (VP) chased the dog. The second division recognizes a verb ‘chased’ and another noun phrase ‘the dog’. The next division would produce combinations of a ‘determiner’ (det) and a noun (N) the + girl; the + dog. This is the ‘phrase structure’ of the sentence, and it can be displayed as a tree diagram:

The kind of representation of the phrase structure of a sentence is known a ‘phrase marker’ (P-marker). Phrase structures are also sometimes represented as labelled sets of brackets {[the/girl] [chase/ed] [the/dog]}, but these are more difficult to read, especially if a sentence is not simple – {[S [NP [DET_the] [N _girl]] [VP [V_chased] [NP[DET_the] [N_dog]]]}. The lines in Pic. 3 are considered to be the branches of an upside down tree.

The main disadvantage of this analysis is its extra-logical correctness – using the procedures above a researcher can find a general patterns of sentence constituency with every position filled with words belonging to some group type. However, a famous example of a grammatically correct sentence constructed by Noam Chomsky illustrates the necessity to include semantic rules of word combinability into the phrase structure analysis – Colorless green ideas sleep furiously can be diagrammed successfully as a phrase tree:

Pic. 4. A Noam Chomsky’ phrase structure of a sentence.

				S
	N P
			NP				VP
						AdvP
Adj		Adj		N		V		Adv
│		│		│		│		│
Colourless		green		ideas		sleep		furiously

Alternative approaches dispense with the idea of phrase structure rules and operate with the notion of schema instead. In this case phrase structures are not derived from strict and logical rules that combine word groups, but from the specification dependent on kind of semantic content of specific words that may appear in these schemes. One of the approaches is essentially equivalent to a system of phrase structure rules combined with a non-compositional semantic theory.

Pic. 7. A Sample Phrase Structure (Tree Diagram).

Sentence
Noun Phrase			Verb Phrase
	Noun P		Verb Phrase	Noun Phrase			AdvPhrase
					Noun Phrase
det	m	h	mv	det	m	h
│	│	│	│	│	│	│
pron	adj	noun	v	pron	adj	noun	adv
Those	tall	trees	framed	our	lovely	view	nicely

The sentence branches into two parts: a subject phrase and a predicate phrase. These branches then further subdivide into other constituents of the sentence and finally into its individual words. Phrase structure trees can show the same hierarchy of relationships as IC-analysis can. Thus, the tree branching divides those from the phrase it modifies, tall trees. Similarly, it shows that trees is a unit modified by tall. The Tree diagram have an additional advantage in that they can efficiently represent visually how one sentence is placed inside another. They are also easier to read than are the boxes used in IC-analysis.

► Practice section (разбираем на семинаре 6.11.2012 и сдаем до 9.11.2012)

Should be drawn with a pencil! No typing !!!

Read the explanations on the methods of language unit structure analysis again and draw three visual diagrams for EVERY SENTENCE (below) using [1] a Reed-Kellogg diagram, [2] an IC diagram, [3] a Phrase Structure Tree.

CHOOSE ANY THREE sentence out of FIVE !!!

Var. 1	Var. 2	Var, 3	Var. 4	Var. 5
Игнатова А.	Леванова Кс.	Ли В.	Найчук В.	Сукочева Св.
Фесенко А.	Смирнов И.	Беседин А.	Алексеев Р.	Авдеева А.
Сидорович Е.	Саютина Т.	Харламова М.
Керимаханова С.	Куликова Е.	Кравченко Кр.	Коровина Т.	Красюкова Я
Семёнова Е.	Самылина Д.	Суркова Ю.	Мелихова Ек.	Яловцева Ан.
		Цветков Анд.

Variant 1.	1. It has taken me nearly thirty years. 2. James Cagney is remembered for playing gangsters on the screen. 3. But he considered himself a singer and dancer. 4. Willie Nelson’s singing still enthrals audiences. 5. All I wrote I squeezed out if myself by sheer hard work.
Variant 2.	1. I hope you will not find it uninteresting. 2. America cannot postpone confronting environmental problems. 3. Anna Tyler wrote her first book in this room. 4. Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. 5. Walking down the Main Street can be dangerous after dark.
Variant 3.	1. Mr. Rodham was sitting in his study at the Rectory Hall. 2. The basic rule in the White House is to debate internally. 3. Some book reviewers criticize Pat Conroy for retelling the story of his dysfunctional family in each of his novel. 4. Outside the Gothic windows the earth was warm and marvellously calm. 5.  New Yorkers are shocked by the violence.
Variant 4.	1. He sat at his desk dejectedly. 2. Pipes attached to ships a mile above the sea bed will force down the mixture until the ultimate solution. 3. Henry pulled up a chair to the lamp. 4. Thomas Edison became famous for inventing the light bulb. 5. The sporty Jaguar is called XJR.
Variant 5.	1. Mr. Scogran ran to the foot of the stairs to call after me. 2. Inner-city teens often envision themselves dying in a gang war. 3. Julia Child’s first TV show was called The French Chef. 4. One-third of American households sort their garbage now 5. The local hospital profited handsomely.