Syntax Trees--I Need My Monster

You can watch I Need My Monster and read an introduction to syntax trees here.

My name is Herbert and I will be your monster for the evening:

A compound sentence from I Need My Monster is here.

This blog post looks at more difficult sentences in the story:

#1A--"No other monster can scare me like you" is a short sentence with two parts, NP and VP.

#2A-- This syntax tree still has the two basic parts:                                                                                                      [NP I] [VP believe professional monsters should always be well-groomed]

#2B--The two basic parts in this syntax tree can be broken into smaller pieces: [VP-2 includes a verb, "believe," and a complete sentence with its own NP and VP: professional monsters should always be well-groomed]

#3A--This syntax tree has a very short NP [I] and a very long VP: [VP missed his ragged breathing, his nose-whistling, the scrabbling of his uncut claws]

#3B--The VP can be broken up into another VP [VP-2 missed] and three NPs: NP-3, NP-4 and NP-5: [his ragged breathing,] [his nose-whistling,] and [the scrabbling of his uncut claws]

#4B--If we wanted to, we could add the word "and" in between, but in the story, the sentence sounds better without "and"

 At the beginning of this post, we looked at a short sentence. Let's break it up into smaller parts:

#1A has two parts: NP and VP

#1B--Again, the two parts of "No other monster can scare me like you" can be broken up into smaller parts.

If you have any questions about these syntax trees, please leave some comments or questions below. I love to help people learn!