Creative Output

Today I watched this video from the Virtual Linguistics Campus:

After that, I intended to analyse some sentences myself, but I got sidetracked thinking of simple ways to make diagrams like the ones in the video. It looks like there are apps and LaTeX packages to do something like it, but just for fun, I modified the AppleScript I wrote for diagramming monduckens to turn text like this:

Clause(Adverb(Perhaps) NP(Noun(you)) VP(Auxiliary(will) Adverb(never) Verb(find) NP(Determiner(a) Noun(job)) PP(Preposition(as) NP(Determiner(a) Noun(linguist))))) Clause(Conjunction(but) Noun(you) VP(Auxiliary(should) Adverbial(at least) Verb(try)))

into a tree like this in OmniGraffle:

Note that I am not sure if this is strictly correct (I think the adverbial ‘at least’ could have been broken into words, and the conjunction perhaps shouldn’t have been included in the second clause) but it’s how it is in the video. Redone with only rectangles (which is an option when running the script) and using the exact same Tree nester script the monducken diagrams did, this can then be turned into a rather oversized and misaligned version of the sentence with rectangles around the constituents:

I didn’t have a lot of time, so it’s pretty crude as yet, but it would be fairly simple to adjust the settings of the shapes to be more like what’s in the video. I’m posting it now in order to continue with Holidailies.

While we’re on the subject of grammar, The Doubleclicks have just covered a Tom Lehrer song about adverbs. I get this song in my head every single time I answer a ‘how’ question with an L-Y adverb, so I am very happy about the cover.