Thursday, October 9, 2008

Sentence Logic

When I was a child in St. Joseph's Catholic school, I learned the schematic wonders of diagramming sentences. I truly loved the work. Years later, however, I was taught that such exercises were foolish: that language wouldn't be harnessed so neatly and that sentence diagrams don't tell us much really.

But, now I'm wondering. What would Chomsky or my third grade teacher say about this amazing sentence by VP Palin:

"I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people."

Here's Kitty Burns Florey's attempt to sort it out:



Here's a link to Florey's article published in Slate.

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