Can anyone help me make a Chomskian sentence tree with this sentence? I'm stuck.

Question

I'm working on a paper using the syntax of poetry, and one of the sentences I am trying to diagram is this hideous monster:

Up past the Blue Mountains, where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair, its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly, a dark socket from which the coal has poured, the grass as bristly and stout as chives, and me wondering when the ground would break, and me wondering how anything fragile survives; up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I'm working on a paper using the syntax of poetry, and one of the sentences I am trying to diagram ... me wondering how anything fragile survives; up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...[/nq]
It's not a grammatical sentence.

Mike Nitabach

Usenet · Answer

Michael Nitabach wrote on 08 Apr 2004:
[nq:2]I'm working on a paper using the syntax of poetry, ... met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...[/nq]
[nq:1]It's not a grammatical sentence.[/nq]It doesn't matter what the surface structure looks like. It can be chomsky-treed into a deep structure that accounts for the surface structure, after a few ad hoc transformations, of course. And considering that it is written, more or less, in the stream of unconsciousness style known as Ankle's Write Like You Think Instead of How It Might Look on the Page with Proper Punctuation Or How It Might Come Across to Your Reader, it's pretty damned clear and comprehensible and violates none of the grammatical rules I know of, except those subjective rules of punctuation that nobody can agree on anyway, so why fault it for that? The more important question to ask about this piece of discourse is not whether it is grammatical, for that is far too pedantic for something as creatively descriptive as the Mannish sentence in question here, but what the purpose of all the scenic moralizing is and how it all relates to the not-Rumpelstiltskin-at-all- at-allish little man the author met.

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.
For email, ehziuh htiw rehpycrebyc ecalper.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]It doesn't matter what the surface structure looks like. It can be chomsky-treed into a deep structure that accounts for ... of all the scenic moralizing is and how it all relates to the not-Rumpelstiltskin-at-all- at-allish little man the author met.[/nq]
It's not a sentence. It's a sequence of adverbial phrases, which, one presumes, set a stage for something to happen on. Each phrase is a brushstroke or a prop or a piece of scenery, and each of them has a discernible structure that can be hung on a phrase-structure tree.

But there's no reason why the whole thing ought to be put on a single tree. It's not a single sentence. A whole series of trees is more like it, one for each punctuation-delimited chunk. That's no problem.

-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept "It is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek." Virginia Woolf

Usenet · Answer

John Lawler wrote on 09 Apr 2004:
[nq:2]It doesn't matter what the surface structure looks like. It ... relates to the not-Rumpelstiltskin-at-all- at-allish little man the author met.[/nq]
[nq:1]It's not a sentence. It's a sequence of adverbial phrases, which, one presumes, set a stage for something to happen ... a single sentence. A whole series of trees is more like it, one for each punctuation-delimited chunk. That's no problem.[/nq]
I was thinking that if the "up in Pennsylvania" PP were put at the front for the deep structure, it would be a complete sentence:

"Up in Pennsylvania, up past the Blue Mountains, where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair, its roads sunken in like a gray washboard, (and) where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly, a dark socket from which the coal has poured, the grass as bristly and stout as chives, and me wondering when the ground would break, and me wondering how anything fragile survives, I met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin at all, at all."
Now, this could probably pass the Faulkner test(1). And those semi- colons are merely separating comma-separated groups of adverbial phrases, each group focused on a single topic. The main sentence, of course, is "Up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man (who was) not Rumpelstiltskin at all, at all." Everything else is parenthetical as ****. I won't say that it is a model of clarity or comprehensibility, but it now fits into one slightly Draconian sentence mould.

So now I have created sort of a deep structure for the sentence, one that can be transformed to place the first adverbial clause right in front of the main clause of the entire thing.
We're dealing with stream of consciousness prose here, not the sort of thing that linguists or EFL teachers or medical editors analyze every day. And I expect that if "Because I said so" is acceptable as an adequate and complete response to the question "Why do I have to X?", then the OP's quote can be considered acceptable as an adequate and complete sentence, but not necessarily a good one.

At least, that is my feeling. I think the OP ought to consider nailing itself to a cross today as penance for setting itself such a task without knowing enough about it to do it without asking for help. If I thought it was worth the effort, I would be happy to do it myself, but, IMHO, it's not. Nothing will kill the pleasure of reading what one considers poetry faster than creating a Chomskian sentence tree for it. Sigh.
If only the thing hand't ended with "not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all..."
Double sigh.
(1) Here is part of what one critic has to say about the prose in Absalom, Absalom! :
"Faulkner's sentences, sometimes an entire page in length, are often highly impressionistic. They appear as piecemeal collections of thoughts, continually in motion and strung together by parenthesis and dashes. They are used to build an emotional mood or dramatically bring forth a sensual image. The total action of the novel also has a quality of seeming to be always in motion, moving forward and backward in time, with meaning being constantly added and altered."
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmAbsalom50.asp

And here's the first line of the novel:
"From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty- three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."*

* Copyright 1995-2003 Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0375508724-0

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.
For email, ehziuh htiw rehpycrebyc ecalper.

Can anyone help me make a Chomskian sentence tree with this sentence? I'm stuck.

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