Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / April 2009

Hello,

I am trying to teach my 3 Chinese students to perform grammatical
analysis on English sentences (or what some people call "diagramming a
sentence"). I am nothing close to a qualified English teacher; I only
come from a heavily French Canadian education background. Back in high
school, I was taught to perform grammatical analysis for the French
language, but never for the English language. Of course, since both
languages originate from Western Europe, I was curious whether I could
apply the same analysis on English sentences as I would on French
sentences, so a few years ago I asked my English teacher in pre-
university college about it. She said that, indeed, the structure of
English sentences is similar enough to that of French sentences that I
can pretty much apply the same analysis, with minor differences - e.g.
we don't have gerunds in French, AFAIK. She also said that although
the vocabulary for French grammatical analysis may not be "official"
when applied in the context of English, the majority of it definitely
would not be "wrong" as far as the meaning and result are concerned.
That English teacher is from Britain, so I trust her.

Now, given that I can apply mostly the same grammatical analysis in
English as in French, the English sentence would then be composed of
one or more clauses. The core of each clause is, naturally, the
conjugated verb, just like in French. So now my first challenge is
teaching my students to identify conjugated verbs (i.e. the
predicate), as opposed to infinitives, participles, gerunds, and maybe
more forms that I'm missing.

Here are a few rules or guidelines that I have come up with:
"If a word looks like a verb and comes right after a preposition, it
is not conjugated, and thus not the predicate."
"If a word that looks like a verb is a found between an article or a
determiner, and a noun, it is not a predicate."
"If a word does not _look like_ it has a subject, it is _probably_ not
a predicate; verbs in the imperative mood make exceptions, of course."
"Some words in English may belong to multiple classes, so what looks
like a verb may not be a verb at all in any particular sentence. Check
the dictionary for all possible classes when the "verb" doesn't look
like it is doing a verb's job."

I am probably missing a few more that would be useful. Would anybody
be able to come up with more rules?