At the Public Domain Review, Hunter Dukes writes about “American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century”:
More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.Dukes provides many examples of these efforts (with links to the books they’re drawn from). Here is a fairly tame diagram of a syntax tree, from Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge’s A Comprehensive English Grammar (1890):
[Click for a larger tree, which you must imagine as standing upright.]Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog’s streamlined (and soil-less, and bark-less) approach to diagramming sentences — still taught in some schools — is an earlier invention, introduced in Higher Lessons in English (1877). I wonder why anyone would have opted for the ornateness of Gauss–Hodge instead.
Thanks, Steven, for letting me know about this PDR post.
A related post
“We’re supposed to decorate a sentence”
comments: 4
So what’s your take on diagramming sentences? Do you think that by vizualizing a sentence’s structure, writers can be taught to write more readable sentences? I’m skeptical.
I learned how to diagram sentences (in high school, I think), and I do think it can help a young writer to understand how sentences work. I don’t think it’s necessary to diagram sentences, but I think that making sentences that are not merely adequate but that serve one’s purposes in writing depends at least in part on an understanding of grammar and syntax — understanding, for instance, how to subordinate one idea to another, or how to manage parenthetical elements in a sentence.
Although I read a lot, what helped me as a writer was learning about what you say, subordination, as in having various clauses. I still get a kick out of consciously using a compound sentence, without subordination of clauses.
For a good while I used to proof read from the bottom up by labelling the type of sentence I had used, which then trained my eye, resulting in making revisions that I wouldn't have made without first labeling.
When I taught prose writing, I placed great emphasis on the sentence, every sentence as something up for grabs, subject to revision. Very helpful when most student writers are trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible.
Post a Comment