Parsing sentences/clauses - The SAP - Garie McIntosh

The Syntactic Analyses Project
(The SAP)

Parsing English sentences

Topics & analyses

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A grammatical project by

Pied-piping

Parsing sentences to better understand this syntactic theory

Next slide - The "hinge element"

Dell-Dell and Christine stood under the palm tree, whose baby leaves were swaying lightly in a most gentle sea breeze.

Dell-Dell and Christine stood under the palm tree, the baby leaves of which were swaying lightly in a most gentle sea breeze.

About four steps along a short passageway, at the end of which was a kitchen.

About four steps along a short passageway, at whose end was a kitchen.

About four steps along a short passageway, which had a kitchen at the end.

All of the above examples, except the second and the last one, feature Pied-piping. Click here to find out more

Comparative Clauses

Parsing comparative sentences for the hinge element

Next slide - Relative clauses

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Relative Clauses

Parsing relatives to identify the function of complementizers and filler-gap dependencies

Next slide - Other elements of English

Click here to find out what's at play in these sentences

“It’s really an important public health strategy that we have people thinking about.”

"Yes, and I think that it's something that—I had to find a way to understand as an adult.”

Dell-Dell’s life was as what she would have imagined her septuagenarian years to be.

She sipped from a glass what looked like orange juice.

Grammar, Syntax, and Theories

Parsing sentences to better understand the following:

Next slide - Benefits of The SAP

Form and function

Relative clauses

Syntactic theories

Discover aspects of English
to perfect
your writing, diction, and editing

MCINTOSHFORMS™ is one such editing tool. Click here to find out more, or click the next link.

Next slide - Be inspired!

There are many ways to parse a sentence

Once you understand the syntactic functions and grammatical functions, and the theories and principles at play in each proposition, you have a powerful editing tool.

"Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations."

—Edward Sapir, Language (1921)

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The SAP

See more analyses

The Syntactic Analyses Project (The SAP)

A process of grammatical division and identification of syntactic functions

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

The SAP will focus on the analysis of sentences/clauses drawn from a variety of sources, which will be used to highlight grammatical rules as well as some linguistic theories and phenomena. This analysis will be conducted by parsing (dividing) sentences and determining (identifying) their syntactic functions. The goal is to understand the exact meaning of a word or phrase, or a sentence/clause.

This process of grammatical division and identification of syntactic function will highlight grammatical form and grammatical function. In sum, through its parses The SAP will put on display the traditional rules of grammar, the goal of which is to encourage grammatical proficiency.

As you may have already correctly inferred, parse is used here in its linguistic sense, which, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition, means:

a: to divide (a sentence) into grammatical parts and identify the parts and their relations to each other

b: to describe (a word) grammatically by stating the part of speech and explaining the inflection

The SAP posts

These use a process of grammatical division, and identification of syntactic functions to help you understand the exact meaning of a word or phrase, or a sentence.

View all SAP posts

May 4, 2022

Optional “that” vs. obligatory “that”

Introduction This post highlights the use of that as a function word, which refers to what a word does as opposed to what it looks like […]

April 24, 2020

Extraposition is an expletive construction

Pronoun it is the subject According to John Lawler, extraposition “seems to work to keep subject complement clauses from assuming the normal subject position preceding the […]

April 20, 2020

Parsing for complementizers that have filler-gap dependencies

In the following examples, each modifying clause “contains a ‘gap,’ while the head noun is interpreted as the thing which fills this gap, making the sentence […]