Grammar By Diagram: Understanding English Grammar Through Traditional Sentence Diagraming

338 Pages·2006·1.424 MB·English

by  Cindy L. Vitto

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g r a m m a r
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understanding english grammar through
traditional sentence diagraming
second edition
Cindy L. Vitto
broadview press
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R e Copyright © 2006 Cindy L. Vitto
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior
written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario m5e 1e5—is an infringement of
the copyright law.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Vitto, Cindy L
Grammar by diagram: understanding English grammar through traditional
sentence diagraming/Cindy L. Vitto.—2nd ed.
Includes index.
isbn
1-55111-778-9
1. English language—Grammar. 2. English language—Sentences. 3. English language—Usage. I. Title.
pe v
1380. 58 2006 428.2 C2006-901730-1
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contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
chapter 1 The Eight Parts of Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
chapter 2 Basic Sentence Patterns for Be and Linking Verbs . . . 45
chapter
3 Basic Sentence Patterns for Intransitive and Transitive
Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
chapter
4 Usage Problems Associated with Adjectives and
Adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
chapter
5 Combining and Expanding Patterns: Compound
Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
chapter
6 Combining and Expanding Patterns: Complex
Sentences with Noun Clauses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
chapter
7 Combining and Expanding Patterns: Complex
Sentences with Adverb and Relative Clauses,
and the Compound-Complex Sentence. . . . . . . . . 145
chapter
8 Usage Problems of Case, Agreement, and
Consistency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
chapter 9 Verbs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
chapter 10 Verbals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
chapter 11 Usage Problems Associated with Verbs and Verbals . 255
chapter 12 Punctuation and Capitalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
chapter 13 Sentence Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Appendix 1 Additional Exercises (no answers provided) . . . . . . 339
Appendix 2 Verb Conjugations (See and Be) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Appendix 3 Irregular and Troublesome Verb Forms. . . . . . . . . 347
Appendix 4 Summary of Clauses and Verbals . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
Appendix 5 Diagraming Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Appendix 6 Commonly Confused Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Answer Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
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acknowledgments
I had no idea, when the first edition of Grammar by Diagrambecame available, that I would be
hearing from people in various parts of the world who had questions, comments, and sugges-
tions about the text. I owe a special thanks to many of those readers, especially Becky Cargile
(who sent me pages of suggestions, shared some of her own excellent teaching strategies and
exercises, and became a kindred soul to whom I could turn whenever I had doubts about con-
tinuing with the second edition); Scott Meyer, a law student who read the text so closely, with
such a finely attuned ear and sharp eye for detail, that he deserves credit for smoothing out many
sentences that I hadn’t realized were capable of improvement; Judge James Bentivegna and Denis
Costrum, who shared with me verb tables they had drawn up for themselves as a way of
remembering verb voice, tense, and aspect. In addition to the many informal readers of the text,
I also owe thanks to the anonymous readers selected by Broadview Press to evaluate Grammar
by Diagram. Their clear and constructive comments have led to definite improvements for the
second edition.
As was the case with the first edition, I also thank the students at Rowan University who
have toiled through the text—whether with Barbara Patrick, Donna Jorgensen, or myself at the
head of the class—and have given me valuable feedback. Also, once again I am happy to
acknowledge my family, especially my husband and daughter, George and Elizabeth, along with
Mindy, Kristy, and Erin. Without them, I would not have the impetus to bring this work to
completion. Without them, there would be no poetry in the deep structure of my life.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the influence of the many fine teachers of literature and
language that I have been privileged to know. While working on the final changes for the second
edition, I was obliged to make a trip to my home town of Parsons, West Virginia. Thanks to
our friends Jane and Jack McGuigan, I was able to peruse the holdings of the Tucker County
Historical Society, visit the building that used to be Parsons High School, and reminisce about
the devoted teachers I had known there and elsewhere. My visit reminded me of just how impor-
tant teachers are, at every stage of one’s life, and how—just as children eventually take over the
parental role—our own students often come to take over the teaching role. To all of my teach-
ers (including my students) and to my parents, who somehow instilled in me a love of learn-
ing even though they had little formal education themselves, I dedicate this book.
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introduction
To grasp the concept of grammar as a discipline, we need a frame of reference—a basic over-
all perspective plus definitions for several key terms. The overarching principle is that grammar,
in the purest sense, is a method of describing the way people actually use language, in both spoken
and written forms. There is no one “right” way to describe language, and in fact the history of
grammar illustrates that through the centuries the English language has been analyzed from var-
ious perspectives—for example, as if it were an offshoot of Latin and should therefore be
manipulated to follow certain rules of that language, as a tool for moving up the social ladder,
as a way of explaining basic operational rules not only of English but of all human language.
One way of approaching the most recent developments in the field is to note that many spe-
cialists employ the plural, “grammars,” indicating that not all who speak English follow the same
rules, but that no one set of rules is inherently superior to any other. And that, perhaps, is what
often comes as the biggest shock to those who enter a serious course of study in English gram-
mar: the notion that grammar does not come stocked with a rigid set of “rights” and “wrongs,”
and, even more surprising, that linguistic experts do not all describe the language in exactly the
same way, using the same terms. This is not to imply, of course, that there are no standards,
but to remind us all that any grammar textbook is, to some extent, set up in an arbitrary fash-
ion, and usually set up to reinforce a particular variety of the language—the “prestige” dialect
favored by educated individuals in positions of academic, political, and social leadership. In fact,
modern English itself has evolved from a particular dialect of Old English and then Middle English.
Before we proceed to analyze the grammar of our language, let’s take a few moments for an
overview of its history.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
What language might we be speaking today if not for the various twists and turns of history that
led us to modern English? We might be speaking a language with the distinctly musical accents
of Gaelic and Welsh, two languages still spoken in the United Kingdom. We might be speak-
ing something that would sound like German, Dutch, or a Scandinavian language. We might
even be speaking French. Instead, we are in some ways speaking a mixture of all these languages,
and we call it English. To understand the evolution of our language, we need to grasp the impact
of a series of invasions on the island that today we call England.
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guage derived from what scholars call Indo-European, an ancient language whose existence we
postulate from similarities among certain words found in several modern languages. The Celts
bc
received an exploratory visit from the Roman general Julius Caesar in 55 and then, begin-
ad
ning in 43 , were subject to a series of attacks by invading Roman legions. Eventually the
Celts and Romans came to live somewhat peacefully together, but when Rome itself came under
attack from barbarians, the Roman soldiers left to defend their homeland, leaving the Celts rel-
atively defenseless.
ad
About 449 , small tribes of people that we know today as Angles,Saxons,and Jutessailed
across the North Sea from Denmark and Germany. The Jutes had originally been asked by
Vortigern, a Celtic king, to help repel two other tribes that had been causing trouble for the
Celts; however, the Jutes themselves, along with the Angles and Saxons, soon became the
invaders. The most successful resistance to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes was organized by a Celtic
chief by the name of Artorius, apparently the real-life model for the legendary King Arthur.
Eventually the Anglo-Saxons (as the tribes came to be known) set up seven distinct kingdoms
of their own, while the Celts moved to the west and north, with some sailing off to northern
France, where the Breton dialect is spoken today. Now that they had effectively taken over the
island, the Anglo-Saxons called the Celts “wealas,” meaning “foreigners.” From “wealas”
comes the name “Wales,” the area of England where many of the Celts settled and where today
Welsh remains a living language. The Anglo-Saxon language, or Old English, absorbed only
about a dozen Celtic words, most of them describing geographical structures, such as “crag” (a
steep, rugged rock or cliff) and “tor” (a high, steep hill).
The Anglo-Saxons spoke an inflected language, meaning that word order is not important
because the forms of the words in a sentence indicate the function of each word. For example,
the word “cyning” (king) becomes “cyninges” to mean “of the king” and changes to “cyninge”
to mean “for the king.” Furthermore, “cyning” serves as the subject form, while a different
form—“cyningas”—indicates that the word is used as the object of a verb. As you can see, modern
English is not an inflected language; unless we were forming a plural or a possessive, we would
use simply “king” and then rely on prepositions and/or word order to grasp the use of the word
within the sentence.
ad
When Christianity took hold in England beginning about 597 , Latin took over as the
prestige language—the tongue used for administrative, legal, and religious purposes. Christianity
added many words to the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language; for example, the Latin word
“evangelium” (good news) became “godspell” in Old English and eventually “gospel” in
modern English.
ad
Beginning about 750 , the Anglo-Saxons, who had driven out the Celts, now found
themselves struggling against invaders from what is today Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Viking raids began in earnest in 793, when monasteries in the north of England were sacked for
their gold and silver, and by about 850 half of the country belonged to the Vikings. In 871, a
newly crowned Anglo-Saxon king named Alfred managed to raise a small army and defeat a band
of Danes, resulting in a treaty that established an area known as the Danelaw, where the Danes
agreed to settle. With the Danes in the north and the Anglo-Saxons in the south, Alfred used
this time of comparative peace to draw his people together and to rebuild monasteries and
schools, using Old English to accomplish his tasks. He also commissioned the writing of the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle, a “diary” of historical events in English. At the same time that Alfred was assur-