SYNTAX: EXERCISE 3

Directions:

The sentence below is taken from the first sentence of the "nonsense" poem Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).  The poem appears in Through the Looking Glass, Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The point of analyzing a sentence that appears to be pure nonsense is to observe how much information is contained in the syntactic structures themselves.   Even if a speaker of English does not know the meanings of the words invented by Lewis Carroll, the speaker's grasp of the rules of English syntax permits a complete syntactic analysis and diagramming of the sentence.

In Through the Looking Glass, the character Humpty Dumpty explains the meanings of the words in the poem.  Humpty Dumpty's exegesis will be quoted at the appropriate points as the analysis proceeds.

Decide where you would make your first cut if you were diagramming the syntactic structure of this sentence.  That is, decide what the Immediate Constituents (ICs) of the sentence are.

Mark the first IC as follows.  Start by positioning the mouse pointer over the checkbox that belongs to the first word in the sentence.  Since the sentence begins with the contraction 'Twas, which stands for It was, the first "word" here is 'T.   Check the box over 'T by clicking once with the mouse.  Then put checkmarks in  the boxes over all of the other words that belong to the same IC as 'T.  Leave the boxes over the other words unchecked.

If you check a box and then change your mind, you can remove the checkmark by clicking on the box again.

When you have finished checking the appropriate boxes, click on the "GO" button.

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