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The Syntactic Analyses Project (The SAP)

A process of grammatical division and identification of syntactic functions

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:

  1. 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.
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 […]