Comments on: Cartoon diagramming

By: ktoobusy

ktoobusy — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:28:55 +0000

I use this sentence to help my students remember complex sentence structure and punctuation (understood that).

By: arnold zwicky

arnold zwicky — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 02:38:28 +0000

Yes, I noticed the diagram was non-standard, and wondered whether this was intentional or an imperfect recollection of the R-K system.

By: John Lawler

John Lawler — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:15:39 +0000

That's a very interesting, and decidedly non-standard, R-K diagram for the complement S, though. Normally I saw a pussycat -- never mind the eye dialect -- would be on top of a vertical tree growing out of the slot after the DO marker following thought . Here, though, the complement S simply starts up with a new subject (I) in that slot, on the same line, as if bracketing its clausehood were irrelevant, compared to positioning its speech order. Which is probably, in fact, the case for many speakers, with a quaificational I thought .. main clause.