Grammar: analyze "He was eating and talking."

# Context:

I chose to analyze this sentence because I already know it is not straightforward. I encountered this sentence while doing my finding verbs series. 

# Goals:

• Outline the sentence in various ways and pick the best one, or decide that the top options are equivalent.

# Action Plan:

• Load the following guides (skim them and keep them in mind while doing the below)
• FI's grammar article: English Language, Analysis & Grammar
• Creating blog posts
• Learning how to self-evaluate grammar
• Process guides are analogous to program algorithms
• Outline the sentence in various ways
• Compare and contrast them
• Pick the best one or decide that more than one are equivalent

# Work:

So the sentence I'm working on is: He was eating and talking.

I'm not sure whether to treat the main verb as "was" or "eating"/"talking". Now that I say that, I think I'm saying vague nonsense. What is a "main verb"? I'm not even sure that that is a grammar concept. So I googled it and actually "main verb" is a grammar concept according to a bunch of stuff on the internet. I searched through FI's grammar article for "main verb" and I didn't find it. My guess is that Elliot didn't think "main verb" is a useful concept compared to the rest of the concepts he used for his grammar article. So for now I'll treat "main verb" as a real thing that I think I understand.

One way to outline the sentence is this (treating "was" as the main verb):

<He> <was> <eating and talking>.

• Which is of the form: <Subject> <linking verb> <complement>.
• This means that eating and talking are nouns made from verbs (i.e. present participles).

I could also outline it like this:

• Verb(linking): was
• Subject: He
• Complement: eating and talking
• Conjunction: and
• noun(present participle): eating
• noun(present participle): talking

Now I'll try to outline the sentence treating "was" as the helper verb for the main verbs "eating" and "talking". (Note: I already have a hunch that this doesn't make sense because in this scheme there are two main verbs and I think I should only have one. Not sure about this though. I will revisit this.)

<He> <was> <eating and talking>. (same as above)

• Which is of the form: <Subject> <helper verb> <verb phrase>.
• This means that "eating" and "talking" are verbs and "was" is a helper verb for those verbs.

I could also outline it like this:

• Verb phrase: eating and talking
• Conjunction: and
• Verb 1: eating
• Verb 2: talking
• Helper verb: was
• Subject: He

I don't like this outline because it puts analysis of the verb phrase on the same level as the helper verb and the subject. I thought to change the outline so that they are not at the same level, but I don't know how to do that while making the idea tree look right. I thought maybe I should add a node called "Analysis of verb phrase" and then put the "Conjunction: and" node and its children as a child of the new node, like so:

• Verb phrase: eating and talking
• Subject: He
• Helper verb: was
• (Analysis of verb phrase)
• Conjunction: and
• Verb 1: eating
• Verb 2: talking

If I were to judge which grammar interpretation is best, given what I've already written, I'd pick the first one because it doesn't require a weird extra node called "Analysis of verb phrase".

Now I'm thinking I should analyze simpler equivalent sentences: "He was eating." and "He ate."

• He was eating.
• Verb: Eating
• Subject: He
• Helper verb: was
• He ate.
• Verb: ate
• Subject: He

And the other variation for "He was eating":

• He was eating.
• Verb(linking): was
• Subject: He
• Complement: eating

I guess that since "He was eating" is equivalent in meaning to "He ate", I should use the same type of grammar analysis for "He was eating" as "He ate" (where "eating"/"ate" is treated as the main verb, which leaves "was" as a helper verb.

 

So using that logic, my first analysis is the best one:

• Verb(linking): was
• Subject: He
• Complement: eating and talking
• Conjunction: and
• noun(present participle): eating
• noun(present participle): talking

This also agrees with my earlier reasoning: "If I were to judge which grammar interpretation is best, given what I've already written, I'd pick the first one because it doesn't require a weird extra node called "Analysis of verb phrase"."

# Analysis:

I think I did well. I arrived at a grammar interpretation that survived all my criticism and beat all the other interpretations I thought of.

# Next steps:

Prioritize this post for external criticism. Also do more grammar analyses of sentences like this one.