Though it elicits violent reactions in some, sentence diagramming fascinates me—not as a rigid formula for “proper” sentence construction, but as a breathtaking visual representation of the natural patterns of language. A sentence dissected for its component parts becomes an optical onomatopoeia, with words and phrases tilting, hovering, and resting in relation to the meaning they convey and their connections with each other.
Inspired by Kitty Burns Florey‘s diagram of one of Sarah Palin’s painful utterances, Garth Risk Hallberg over at The Millions turned an Obama sentence into a pretty scramble of lines and words.
This sentence
My view is also that nobody’s above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
becomes this (click to see detail):
His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.)… Nothing feels tacked on; the “ums” and “ahs” Obama sometimes inserts into his speeches are not meant to buy time to think about substance, or to long for a teleprompter (sorry, conservative bloggers), but to make sure his long sentences stay on solid grammatical terrain. At the same time, Obama’s confidence in the basic architecture of his sentences allows him to throw in some syntactically varied riffs and qualifiers: an absolute phrase here, a correlative conjunction or comparative adjective there.…This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls “having more than one voice in your ear.”
the irony is that conservatives are married to all this kind of old style grammar school pedagogy. what are they going to do, use chomsky to criticize sentence diagramming?
This one should have been tagged “Zzzzzz.”
This is giving me jungle flashbacks from my undergraduate Linguistics course.
This kind of sentence diagramming is something that, if still done at all, is done in middle school, and even so it’s very 1950s.
Nowadays, linguists use a more sophisticated and useful tree-style diagramming system for analyzing the structure and hierarchies (i.e. syntax) of utterances. I don’t know how to upload an image of such a tree diagram here, but I’d like call on Slog to find a linguistics grad student or professor at UW to do one for them. It often feels like The Stranger is 30 years behind whenever issues of language and linguistics come up. Just sayin’.
This brings up an interesting point. Are there puzzle books where you have to reconstruct sentences from their diagrams? That would be a great gift for a friend of mine. I can imagine one of Palin’s sentences as a brain teaser with no solution.
Or Bush, God forbid. Gives me the willies just thinking about it.
William Gass has written pretty extensively about language as architecture. Others too, but I think mainly Gass.