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Monday, December 8, 2014

Opinion about Victor Frankenstein (Syntax Trees)

Most English sentences are usually made of two parts: NP (Noun Phrase) and VP (Verb Phrase). A short way to say this is "S = NP VP."

Let's start with "He was a brilliant scientist, and with hard work, he was successful in creating life." This is really two sentences:
He was a brilliant scientist [Syntax Tree]
AND
We can put them together with a coordinating conjunction (CC: and, or), a word that connects two similar things (two nouns, two verbs, two sentences etc.):
He was a brilliant scientist, and with hard work, he was successful in creating life [Syntax Tree]
Here are some more sentences and their syntax trees:

"To make a better world, scientists must experiment" 

The second part (scientists must experiment) is an independent sentence. The first part (To make a better world), is a bare verb phrase. "To" means "for this purpose"

"To make a better world" 為了讓世界更美好
These two sentences can be put together to make one longer sentence:
To make a better world, scientists must experiment [Syntax Tree]
"Sadly for Victor, his creation was an evil monster" is another short sentence which has two parts:
An adverbial phrase (AdvP) is used to express an opinion about this situation:
We put these two together to make a longer sentence:
Sadly for Victor, his creation was an evil monster [Syntax Tree]
The 4th sentence is made of two smaller sentences;
We put these together with the word because:
We should feel sorry for Victor because the monster destroyed everything he loved [Syntax Tree]
The writer concludes by saying:

Victor tried to kill the monster to protect other people and he died in the process.