Directions:

Here is a sentence from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"). The point of the sonnet, at least on the surface, is that true love does not change with time. The sentence below combines traditional images to make that point. Time is imagined, perhaps, as a monarch who might keep a "fool," a court jester, to amuse him. Love, however, says the poet, is not Time's fool, not something to be laughed at or held in contempt. But Time is also imagined as the Grim Reaper, and we have to admit that the physical beauty that attracts love ("rosy lips and cheeks") are subject to the ravages of Time. They will eventually be mowed down by Time's "sickle."

As usual in these exercises, there are checkboxes over each word in Shakespeare's sentence.  Decide where you would make your first cut if you were diagramming the syntactical structure of this sentence.  That is, decide what the Immediate Constituents (ICs) of Shakespeare's 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 (Love--note that Love's is a contraction of the two words Love is). Check the box over Love 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 Love.  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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