Putting It Together

Miscellaneous

The constructions that do not fit neatly under any earlier heading — passives with an agent, verbs that share an object, and the honest limits of both notations.

What you’ll learn

Diagram a passive sentence and place its agent
Classify a verb as linking, intransitive, monotransitive or ditransitive
Recognise two verbs sharing one object
Know where both notations stop being able to help

Passives and their agent

In a passive sentence the subject receives the action. Often the doer is left out entirely — The window was broken — but when it is named, it arrives in a by phrase: The window was broken by hail.

That by phrase is the agent. Structurally it is an ordinary prepositional phrase hanging below the verb — no special notation — but the parser marks it out with its own relation, agent, because it is doing something a normal adverbial phrase is not.

Check the verb form
A passive is be plus a past participle: was broken, had been cleaned.
Confirm the subject is not acting
The window did not break anything; it was broken.
Diagram the by-phrase as an ordinary phrase
Below the verb, diagonal and horizontal, like any other.

“The window was broken by hail.”

Reed-Kellogg — the agent is an ordinary prepositional phrase

detDeterminer
nsubjpassPassive nominal subject
auxpassPassive auxiliary
ROOTRoot of the sentence
agentAgent (passive)
pobjObject of preposition

Dependency — nsubjpass and agent name what the diagram cannot

Comparing the two views

Reed-Kellogg gives the agent no special mark — it looks exactly like broken by Tuesday would. The dependency parse distinguishes them: agent rather than prep, and nsubjpass rather than nsubj. Here the tree is carrying real information the diagram simply does not encode, which is the reverse of the usual balance in this section.

The four verb types

Every clause-heading verb in the database is classified by what it takes after it. The classification belongs to the sentence, not to the verb — most English verbs can be more than one type depending on how they are used.

Type	Takes	Example
Intransitive	nothing	The window shattered.
Monotransitive	a direct object	Hail shattered the window.
Ditransitive	a direct and an indirect object	She showed me the crack.
Linking	a complement describing the subject	The window looks fragile.

Two verbs, one object

Barbara mowed and watered the lawn. — she mowed the lawn and watered the lawn. One object, shared between two verbs.

This is genuinely hard for a parser. In the dependency parse only watered has an object child; mowed has none, so it looks intransitive. Nothing in the parse is wrong — the information simply is not there — and the app lets an editor mark the shared object by hand, which is what makes the diagram draw the shared-object shape instead of two independent branches.

Where both notations stop

Neither notation covers everything, and it is more useful to know the edges than to pretend they are not there.

Idioms. put up with is one verb meaning tolerate, but both notations dismantle it into a verb and two prepositions.
Ellipsis. She can swim, and he can too — the second clause has a missing verb phrase that Reed-Kellogg must invent and the tree cannot represent.
Ambiguity. I saw the man with the telescope has two analyses. Each notation draws one at a time; neither can show that both are available.
Meaning. Both describe structure only. Neither can tell you whether a sentence is true, or kind, or well written.

Key terms

Agent: The doer in a passive sentence, named in a by phrase. Relation agent. The road was flooded by the storm. The letter was signed by the mayor.
See: Sentence Types & Voice, Core Arguments
Transitivity: How many objects a verb takes in a given sentence: none, one, or two. She slept. — none. She read the letter. — one. She gave him the letter. — two.
See: Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Shared object: One direct object belonging to two coordinated verbs. Invisible to the parser, so it is marked by hand. Barbara mowed and watered the lawn. He washed and dried the plates.
See: Imperatives & Conjunctions
Ellipsis: Words omitted because they can be recovered from context. Neither notation represents them well. She can sing, and he can too. — sing is left out after the second can. Some left early, others late. — left is left out.

Practice on a real sentence

Correlative conjunctions (both … and) with two verbs sharing a subject. One of the trickier published sentences — a fitting last exercise.

“She both knows and corresponds with the queen.”

Parts of speech

Give every word its coarse Universal Dependencies category.

Words 0/8Attempts 0Correct 0Time 0:00

Sentence — select a part of speech below, then click the word(s) it applies to

She both knows and corresponds with the queen.