I Need My Monster--Introduction to Syntax Trees

Many small children are afraid to sleep at night. They think there are monsters under their bed or in their closet. If they go to sleep, the monsters might come out and eat them!

I Need My Monster, written by Amanda Noll, is different and funny. You can read this story as a Kindle book or a regular book.

You can also listen to Rita Moreno read you the story on Youtube or on Storylineonline.net. Very important! If you click on [CC] at the bottom of the YouTube video, you can see the words when she says them.
 
In this story, Gabe is the name of a little boy's monster. Gabe is gone for a few days, so the boy can't sleep. "I need my monster," he says. Other monsters come to replace Gabe, but he is not afraid of them. We will use this story to talk about the grammar of English sentences.

Herbert is the first monster who comes that night. He says: "My name is Herbert and I will be your monster for the evening." Let's make a syntax tree for this sentence. First, we need to mark the part of speech (Is it a noun, verb, adjective ...?) for each word.

Only marking the parts of speech is not very useful. Next, we will make a syntax tree for this sentence. A syntax tree is a picture of the parts of the sentence:

"My name is Herbert" is a complete sentence.

"My name is Herbert and I will be your monster for the evening." is made of two short sentences, with and in between. "My name is Herbert" is the first short sentence. It is made of two parts, a Noun Phrase ("My name") and a Verb Phrase ("is Herbert"). The Noun Phrase is also made of two parts, a Determiner ("My") and a Noun ("name"). Just like the Noun Phrase, the Verb Phrase is again made of two parts, a Verb Phrase and a Noun Phrase. The Verb Phrase only contains one Verb ("is"); the Noun Phrase also only contains one word, a Noun ("Herbert").

Some sentence rules:

1 "Big fish eat little fish" 
      S = NP VP (A sentence is made of a
      noun phrase [big fish] and a verb phrase eat little fish])

2 "My mother" 
     NP = DET N (A noun phrase can be made of a determiner and a noun)

3 "Fish"
     NP = N (A noun phrase can be made of just one noun [fish])

4 "He" 
     NP = PRON (A noun phrase can be made of just one pronoun)

5 "Fish swim"
     NP VP (A verb phrase can be made of just one verb [swim])

6 "We ate sandwiches in the park"
      NP VP PP = VP (A verb phrase can include another verb phrase
           [VP [VP ate sandwiches] [PP in the park]]