Diagramming Constructions: Some Problems

As all honest grammarians and this Website point out, no grammar yet discovered is perfect.  Structural grammar models the natural language as though speakers construct sentences by rationally combining binary pairs of ICs.  But obviously that model--like all models--oversimplifies the reality it attempts to describe.

The result is that not all diagrams of sentences look like the neat trees that this Website uses to illustrate the principles of a structural syntax.  The purpose of this section of the Website is to illustrate how to deal with some common constructions that might not neatly yield to the model, or might not necessarily match our intuitions about how an English sentence is in fact constructed.

These problems are dealt with under several headings, in no particular order, according to the list below.  Click on each  item for a discussion of that problem.

• Articles (a, an, the)
• Coordination with double coordinators (not only/but also, both/and, etc.)
• Hyphenation (constructions with hyphens)
• Inversions (deviations from normal order of subject-verb-complement)
• Negations (not, the contraction n't)
• Questions
• Sentence modifiers (words or constructions modifying an entire clause--including but not limited to introductory adverbs, introductory participles, introductory prepositional phrases, interjections, nouns of direct address, introductory subordinate clauses)
• Verbs with auxiliaries (including infinitives)
• Verb phrases (dress up, get up, run through, etc.)

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