I tried making some trees for some of the exercises for Homework 1 of Leonard Peikoff’s Grammar Course. View a PDF using this link.
I’ve gone through Lesson 1 of this course before. I looked at my notes a bit to refresh myself on some details but mostly focused on using the course content to practice making trees.
I also made a spreadsheet of some of the terminology in Lesson 1 order to test the import feature of an iOS flashcard app I had. The spreadsheet contents are below
| Grammar is the study of what? | How to put words together to form meaningful sentences. |
| Inflection | Change in form of word in order to express a change in the use or meaning or role of a word. E.g. "I" and "me" are the subject and object forms of "I". |
| Sentence | Group of words expressing complete thought or feeling. |
| 4 types of sentences | declarative (says a fact), interrogative (question), imperative (gives an order), exclamatory ("whew!" or "aha!" which is why feelings are mentioned in definition of "sentence") |
| Meaning of the period | demarcates the end of a unit |
| Expletives | empty word for getting a sentence started, which isn't in subject or predicate. E.g. there in "There are three dogs on the corner." |
| Phrase | There are three dogs on the corner. |
| Prepositions | govern spatial or temporal relationships for some bigger word that comes after them. |
| Adverb | modifies a verb, adjective, adverb. or modifies whole clause or sentence. (adverb often ends with "ly" like "ran quickly") |
| Conjunction | combining word like "and" or "but" |
| Nouns | can be objects but also e.g. "running" or "love" or "space". anything you could say "is" about. |
| Verbs | talk about action (walking, hitting, thinking) or state of being (is healthy, smells good) of some subject. |
| Verbals | word derived from verb, but not a verb. like "running". there are 3 types of verbals: - gerund: noun verbal ("running is fun") - participle: adjective verbal ("running water") - “Running quickly, he soon tired.” — “running” is a participle describing “he.” - infinitive: typically "to [verb]", variety of uses including noun |
| Adjectives | modifies a noun |
| Adverbs | modifies a verb, adjective, adverb. or modifies whole clause or sentence. (adverb often ends with "ly" like "ran quickly") |
| Complement | completes a sentence. adds what's missing to e.g. "I hit" (what?) or "I met" (who?) or "I am" (what?) |
| Object | a complement that designates action rather than state. in "he hit the ball", the ball is the object of the action. but with "He is happy" then "happy" is a complement but not an object. |
| Main Clause | main part of complex multi-clause sentence, essence of thought. for good writing, your main idea should be in the main clause. |