One or two of my junior-high-school English teachers—public school, California, around 1970—showed us how to diagram sentences. I don’t remember diagramming (note the spelling) being pushed hard at us, but it did help me start to understand things like clauses, modification, and parts of speech. Later, in college and graduate school, I majored in linguistics, and the transformational grammar popular at the time went whole-hog with a very different system for analyzing the structure of sentences. Although my linguistics teachers were uniformly dismissive of school-taught approaches to grammar like diagramming, in the decades since those less rigorous methods have been more useful to me when writing and editing English.
I learned English that way. I didn’t necessarily could speak it well, but gosh darn it, I knew all the tenses: present perfect, future perfect continuous, etc. Pretty sure most students graduating high school in US have never heard of such silliness.
To be fair, it laid everything out well, and it did help me understand English better.
This is actually a good example of users of the language adapting it to their needs. "didn't could speak" is not technically correct, but I'm not condemning it. You hear this in some Southern speakers especially, e.g.
"We used to would go to that park"
"That car needs fixed"
"I might could use those verbs correctly.
The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.
As a Southerner who would definitely say "I might could…", I would never say “I didn’t necessarily could speak it well”. That’s not how double modals work. (“I used to could…” seems marginally ok to me though.)
Also the “needs fixed” thing is not a Southern dialect property, I associate it more with like Pittsburgh.
> The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.
You might hold some consideration that for some people, this is how everyone around them talks. And thus they consider it perfectly acceptable, and it is not a consequence of the language being difficult for them.
I went to a Catholic grammar school (yes, I guess that's a pun there). We didn't learn any science, but we sure learned our grammar. Including diagramming sentences (I don't remember all those refinements, though). The process is pretty helpful.
I find that book reader to be very unappealing, and for this Fremont Older book, which I'm currently writing about:
I remember diagramming being covered once, maybe 5th grade, and not sure it was addressed again.
I seem to have ended up with a very strong "sense" for correct english (though I know some parts where I'm weak; and also my online "post a comment" style stuff ends up full of shorthands...). I presume that my "being good at catching grammatical weirdness" comes from several schoolyears learning German, and being a voracious bookworm as a kid.
Curious if that sort of situation is also the case for others who weren't heavily taught diagramming but still feel they ended up being really good at correct written English.
I would be interested in the people who did structural/functional diagramming and views to the concrete/solidity of "that's not proper english" or "that isn't how it works" because the other side of the coin is that english (and obviously other languages: Spanish and gender..) change over time, and are fluid against the needs of their speakers.
I guess I'm arguing that if you did training in the formalism of a parse-tree, I wonder if it tends to re-inforce a view in "proper" use of a language rather than it's emergent behaviour and shifts of meaning.
There are subtle parts of how English works that confuse a lot of people, that diagramming might help with. The most obvious to me was the Harry Potter scene where, in the movie, Professor Snape says "and even put a stopper in death" [0]. The book version was just "even stopper death".
These mean opposite things. One uses "stopper" as a noun, saying to prevent death. The other is using it as a verb, saying to bottle up death - create a potion to cause death.
I don't think this applies, particularly. Diagramming wasn't so much "this is how a sentence should be set up" as "this is the function of this word in this sentence."
While I'm not a prescriptivist, I think diagramming (and the rest of the strict English grammar education I was given in the 70's and 80's) helped me to understand why grammar rules exist and how they bring clarity to communication. I think that also helped me when learning to write code.
Readit News
For whatever reason, it all fell into place easily using that method.
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/i...
(FYI: I am the developer).
To be fair, it laid everything out well, and it did help me understand English better.
This is actually a good example of users of the language adapting it to their needs. "didn't could speak" is not technically correct, but I'm not condemning it. You hear this in some Southern speakers especially, e.g.
"We used to would go to that park"
"That car needs fixed"
"I might could use those verbs correctly.
The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.
For the record, the "correct" English would be:
"I couldn't necessarily speak it well" or
"I didn't necessarily learn to speak it well"
Also the “needs fixed” thing is not a Southern dialect property, I associate it more with like Pittsburgh.
You might hold some consideration that for some people, this is how everyone around them talks. And thus they consider it perfectly acceptable, and it is not a consequence of the language being difficult for them.
I find that book reader to be very unappealing, and for this Fremont Older book, which I'm currently writing about:
https://archive.org/details/myownstory00oldegoog
I downloaded the PDF. I think they should have done that here, too and extracted some actual diagrams.
I seem to have ended up with a very strong "sense" for correct english (though I know some parts where I'm weak; and also my online "post a comment" style stuff ends up full of shorthands...). I presume that my "being good at catching grammatical weirdness" comes from several schoolyears learning German, and being a voracious bookworm as a kid.
Curious if that sort of situation is also the case for others who weren't heavily taught diagramming but still feel they ended up being really good at correct written English.
I guess I'm arguing that if you did training in the formalism of a parse-tree, I wonder if it tends to re-inforce a view in "proper" use of a language rather than it's emergent behaviour and shifts of meaning.
These mean opposite things. One uses "stopper" as a noun, saying to prevent death. The other is using it as a verb, saying to bottle up death - create a potion to cause death.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcnWqz8kafo
Dead Comment