ESL

Question

How many embedded sentences are there in the following sentences? Analyze them by means of a tree diagram or any other way. Comment on the overall complexity.

Alice was just beginning to think to herself "Now what am I to do with this creature when I get back home?" When it grunted again so violently that she looked into it's face in some alarm

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Are you asking us to do your homework for you?

( Are you sure you have typed these sentences correctly? I can see at least three mistakes in them. )

Clive

Anonymous · Answer

Hi Clive, Just asking for some help. Am not very clear on this.

Anonymous · Answer

AnonymousHow many embedded sentences are there in the following sentences? Analyze them by means of a tree diagram or any other way. Comment on the overall complexity. Alice was just beginning to think to herself "Now what am I to do with this creature when I get back home?" When it grunted again so violently that she looked into it's face in some alarm

Anonymous · Answer

‘This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further.’

The first thing we can do is notice that it’s a compound sentence, composed of two independent clauses joined by an and. This is typical of phrases joined by and: If the component phrases are of category X, the phrase as a whole will have category X, too. (And if the component phrases have different categories, which does happen? I’m not even going there today.) There are a couple of ways we could diagram this, shown below, and linguists have yet to agree on which approach reflects better what’s going on in human language.

The diagram on the left says that a coordinate structure has three parts: the two things that you’re coordinating, plus the conjunction. The diagram on the right says that a coordinate structure naturally falls into two chunks, not three: The first thing you’re coordinating, and a chunk consisting of the conjunction and the other thing you’re coordinating. Where I’ve put a label, there is further contention over what kind of phrase this is. To simplify things, I’ll go with the approach on the left.

The next easiest thing to do is to divide each sentence into subject and predicate, or I’m labeling them here, noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP). I’ll present these as two diagrams, and trust that you can graft them onto the one covering the whole sentence at your leisure. The first sentence:

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