Welcome avid learner of linguistics! I thought it was about time
I made a video about syntax. So here's something very basic:
How to draw simple sentence trees.
Let us first take a look into what we would need for such a tree.
When we draw tree diagrams and syntax, we can classify pieces of the sentence into
these four groups:
verb phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases and adjective phrases. Of these
verb phrases and noun phrases are the most important ones, because a complete
sentence has to have these two phrases in order to be a complete sentence.
With that said
let's take a look at the first example!
The very first thing we do is determine the parts of speech in this sentence.
"The" is a determiner,
"syntactician" is a noun, "got" is a verb and "gonorrhoea" is also a noun.
Now we can start grouping - Not groping! Grouping!
"The" and "syntactician" form a noun phrase.
"Since "gonorrhoea" is a noun, it's a noun phrase as well!
Now only "got" is left, and that is a verb belonging to a verb group.
Together with the noun phrase "gonorrhoea" the verb group establishes the verb phrase!
Now we connect noun phrase and verb phrase and we're done!
This sentence this a little more difficult:
Just like in the first sentence, let's first determine the parts of speech!
"She" is a pronoun,
"was" is an auxiliary verb, "sitting" is an inflected verb,
"in" is a preposition,
"a" is a determiner and "boat" is a noun.
And now the tree:
As pronouns function to replace nouns, "she" is the first noun phrase.
"Was sitting" is the verb group of the sentence and the next word "in" already
announces that there's going to be a prepositional phase in the sentence.
"A" and "boat" are left now.
They are a noun phrase
which is integrated into the prepositional phrase. The verb group and
the prepositional phrase constitute the verb phrase.
And after connecting noun phrase and verb phrase,
the tree is done!
And that was it. I hope it didn't hurt that much. If yes: I'm sure you've got some
aspirin somewhere. And if you like this video please give me a thumbs-up and
subscribe! BYE!