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

[muckefuck]

What if you were analysing the subclause on its own (i.e. "Including garlic in the diet can reduce cholesterol"). How would you go about it?

[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.

[helenadax]

That including garlic in the diet can reduce cholesterol is a Direct Object. I'm pretty sure that can reduce cholesterol is a VP but I don't remember the rules about verbs as subjects and even if I did, I'm Spanish and I'm not sure both languages follow the same rules about that.

[kleinerandroid]

Thank you!

[greenkrokodilla]

Sth (= new clinical trials = Noun Phrase) show sth (which in this case is a that-clause -- V+that-clause ).
The verb (show) imposes its own Verb Pattern on the rest of the sentence in this case, show + that-clause
-- Now, "new clinical trials" is a simple NP -- adj+adj+head noun
-- The (that-clause) is simply a clause with its own structure equal to that of a regular sentence:
What? (including garlic in the diet) can do what? (reduce cholesterol)1.1 The first serves as the Subject created from (V-ing + its Verb Phrase

[akibare]

For what it's worth, I worked on a machine translation system long ago now (late 1980's to early 1990's). I worked on the Japanese to English translation program specifically. I started at that company fresh out of high school, doing data entry. (I was hired based on a written examination, part of which was translation and part of which was diagramming sentences in both Japanese and English, so to all those people who laugh and say "why should I ever learn to diagram a sentence in school??" I can say, hey, it got at least ONE person a job

[greenkrokodilla]

Yep, thanks.
Machine translation is a fascinating area, and machines' inability to understand semantics are at the core of the general failure of such systems.

HERE IS A (PARTIAL) ENTRY for a frequent word "LEAVE":

leave ( leaves 3rd person present) ( leaving present participle) ( left past tense & past participle )

1 verb If you leave a place or person, you go away from that place or person.
He would not be allowed to leave the country... V n
I simply couldn't bear to leave my little girl... V n
My flight leaves in less than an hour... V
The last of the older children had left for school. V for n

2 verb If you leave an institution, group, or job, you permanently stop attending that institution, being a member of that group, or doing that job.
He left school with no qualifications... V n
I am leaving to concentrate on writing fiction. V
...a leaving present. V-ing

3 verb If you leave your husband, wife, or some other person with whom you have had a close relationship, you stop living with them or you finish the

[greenkrokodilla]

(continued)
It may seem to a native speaker of English that - because there is a general logical thread connecting different uses of LEAVE, running through these sub-senses, that some of them may be lumped together and redefined as (Oxford dict):

1. cause to or let remain, depart without taking, have at time of one's death.
2. abstain from consuming or dealing with; (in pass) remain over;
3 let remain in unspecified state
and so on

That's how they tried to explain language in the 19 century, and that mindless tradition still survives - well, it is actually thriving in monstrosities like Merriam-Webster