SYNTAX: EXERCISE 11

Directions:

Here is a sentence from the poem "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff," by A. E. Housman. In this poem, someone scolds the poet "Terence" (presumably an alter ego of Housman himself) for not writing happy poems. Terence replies that the function of poetry is not to make people happy with the world, but instead to help them cope with grief by providing company in misery. If one wants to be cheerful and forget the miseries of life temporarily, Terence says, a better strategy is to get drunk.

This sentence from the poem has checkboxes over each word.  Decide where you would make your first cut if you were diagramming the syntactical structure of the 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 (Malt).   Check the box over Malt 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 Malt.  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.
 

Malt  does  more  than  Milton  can  to  justify  God's  ways  to  man. 


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