Hello,I am trying to teach my 3 Chinese students to perform grammatical analysis on English sentences (or what some people call "diagramming a sentence"). I am nothing close to a qualified English teacher; I only come from a heavily French Canadian education background. Back in high school, I was taught to perform grammatical analysis for the French language, but never for the English language. Of course, since both languages originate from Western Europe, I was curious whether I could apply the same analysis on English sentences as I would on French sentences, so a few years ago I asked my English teacher in pre- university college about it.
She said that, indeed, the structure of English sentences is similar enough to that of French sentences that I can pretty much apply the same analysis, with minor differences - e.g. we don't have gerunds in French, AFAIK. She also said that although the vocabulary for French grammatical analysis may not be "official" when applied in the context of English, the majority of it definitely would not be "wrong" as far as the meaning and result are concerned.
That English teacher is from Britain, so I trust her.
Now, given that I can apply mostly the same grammatical analysis in English as in French, the English sentence would then be composed of one or more clauses. The core of each clause is, naturally, the conjugated verb, just like in French. So now my first challenge is teaching my students to identify conjugated verbs (i.e. the predicate), as opposed to infinitives, participles, gerunds, and maybe more forms that I'm missing.
Here are a few rules or guidelines that I have come up with: "If a word looks like a verb and comes right after a preposition, it is not conjugated, and thus not the predicate."
"If a word that looks like a verb is a found between an article or a determiner, and a noun, it is not a predicate."
"If a word does not look like it has a subject, it is probably not a predicate; verbs in the imperative mood make exceptions, of course." "Some words in English may belong to multiple classes, so what looks like a verb may not be a verb at all in any particular sentence. Check the dictionary for all possible classes when the "verb" doesn't look like it is doing a verb's job."
I am probably missing a few more that would be useful. Would anybody be able to come up with more rules?