Syntactic analysis

[kleinerandroid]

Could someone help me with my analysis of the following sentence, please?

'New clinical trials show that including garlic in the diet can reduce cholesterol.'

Comments

[kleinerandroid]

Thank you for replying.

Well, I tried and came up with this :s

[ihcoyc]

I think where the difficulty comes from is that 'including' here is a gerund, a verbal noun that takes its own direct object:

**The recipe includes garlic.
**The act of including garlic.....
Including garlic....

Current English allows this gerund to function as the subject of a verb phrase, and the resulting verb phrase can serve as the subject of a subordinate clause. 'Garlic' here is a direct object; it's what's being included. (Including garlic) is a gerund phrase that is the subject of 'can'.

What's interesting is that 'including' can be omitted without changing the meaning. That would promote 'garlic' to the subject position.