Diagramming Sentences
Sentence Diagrams
~ One Way of Learning English Grammar ~
The Basics of Sentence Diagramming
~ Sentences 41-45 ~
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Sentence 41: Are they not the people to whom we sold our car? |
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| The relative pronoun can be a subject, as in the previous sentence, an object of a preposition, as whom is in this sentence, a possessive (Sentence 42), or a direct object (Sentence 43). Notice the broken line connecting the relative pronoun whom with its antecedent, people. | ||
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Sentence 42: The newlyweds whose house burned down have no insurance. |
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Sentence 43: I am selling the cabin that I built many years ago. |
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| The direct object, that, is a relative pronoun; its antecedent is cabin. The adverbial objective years modifies the adverb ago. | ||
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Sentence 44: Don't forget that you have a dentist's appointment this afternoon. |
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| This that-clause is a noun clause, not a relative clause. When a that-clause functions as a direct object, as it does here, the expletive that is often omitted. When this happens, an x is placed on the line otherwise occupied by that. | ||
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Sentence 45: That man told me that that was the lure that caught the big fish. |
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| The word that is used four different ways in this sentence: as a demonstrative adjective in that man, as an expletive (the first that in that that), as a demonstrative pronoun (the second that in that that), and as relative pronoun (the final that of the sentence). Other demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are this, these, and those. |
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