Saturday, June 27, 2020

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:

# 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.

No comments:

Post a Comment