Michael Cysouw

Read more about Grotefend and about the structure of this sentence here:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

August Grotefend (1798-1836), teacher in Göttingen and nephew of cuneiform-decipherer G.F.Grotefend, was a big fan of Simon Herling and his analysis of the *Period*. In a commentary directed to Latin teachers he gave an example of a *Zergliederung* of a complex Latin sentence from Livius.

Juhu! Ich bin einer der wenigsten 🤪

Hmmm 🧐 @paulita.bsky.social: meinst du, mein schreibstil ist langweilig, oder bin ich kein einflussreicher Linguist? 😬😁

Results: „Transgender women had similar […] relative lean mass […] in comparison to cisgender women“

Conclusion: „While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable.“

So, what is it? Similar or higher???

😮🧐😬

Read more about the interaction of Vaïsse with Barnard and about Vaïsse's highly innovative phonetic transcription system based on iconic articulatory symbols:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.7.5

Highly detailed grammatical annotation for French from Vaïsse (1839).

Léon Vaïsse (1807-1881) was the 13th director of the Deaf Institute in Paris and the 10th president of the Société de Linguistique de Paris. In the 1830 he visited the US where he met Frederick Barnard. They developed highly complex grammatical symbolic systems. Vaïsse published his version in 1839.

Read more about Auguste Bébian here:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.7.4

Basic hierarchical sentence analysis from Bébian (1827: 116). The object of the main clause is indicated by the "3", which itself has its own syntactic structure below the line as indicated by the numbers 1 and 2. The numbers are unfortunately not consistently used in this examples (i.e. some words are unmarked, though Bébian's system clearly provides for numbers)

Auguste Bébian (1789-1839), godchild of Sicard, was pushed out of the Deaf Institute in Paris in 1821 after an altercation about class sizes with an administrator [sic!]. He used his godfather's method of sentence analysis. In 1827 he took it one step further, adding simple hierarchical structures.

😭

we worked on the same floor for a few years int he 1990s in Nijmegen. Good memories!

Read more about Sicard and his old-fashioned use of the subject-copula-predicate analysis here:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.7.2

Derivation of a relative clause from a regular main clause structures from Sicard (1799: 206) in his *Cours d'instruction d'un sourd-muet*

Roch-Ambroise Sicard (1742-1822) was a highly influential teacher for the Deaf in Paris. He uses digits above the words for syntactic functions, with a separate analysis for subordinate clauses. In this figure he explains how a relative clause is derived from a regular main clause structure.

Read more about Solomon Barrett Jr. and his grammatical trees at cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec4.4.4

Frontispiece from Barrett (1857), depicting the structural analysis of the first part of verse Hebrew 1:1 from the King James translation of the Bible: God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.

Solomon Barrett (1800-1882), teacher in Madrid (NY), wrote *The principles of language* in 1837. In 1842 he adds the infamous plate with grammatical trees, influenced by James Brown. In 1857 he adds two frontispieces with possibly the most exquisite grammatical trees in the history of linguistics.

read more about William Hall here: cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec4.4.7

Simple constituency marking by William Hall (1849) in his *Encyclopedia of English grammar*. He calls this analysis *monology* following the work of Jame Brown (the grammarian).

William Hall (no dates known) in 1849 wrote *Encyclopedia of English grammar*, which includes a simplistic kind of constituency, called *monology*, following James Brown (the grammarian, not the musician). There is no link to the *monème* (Frei 1941) from the French structuralist tradition.

Read more about Oliver B. Peirce:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

"chain" of a sentence from Peirce (1839: 50). Note that "for gentleman in Utica" is a single constituent, so it is not really accurate to depict this as a single linear chain.

Diagram from Peirce (1843: 304) for an excerpt from he poem *Life is a sea* from John Mason Good: But rocks below, and tempests sleep, Insidious o'er the glassy deep, Nor leave an hour secure. The diagram is strictly speaking not a real syntactic analysis but more an interpretation of the poetic intention.

Oliver Peirce (1808-1865), teacher in Rome, NY, added syntactic "chains" to his grammar in 1839. In yet another revision in 1843 he adds sentence diagrams. This is the first usage of the term *diagram* for graphical syntax! His diagrams are as much poetic interpretation as syntactic analysis.

Read more about James Brown (the grammarian, not the musician!) at

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Analysis of *very high trees fell* from Brown (1840). The letters represent the words: a=trees, b=fell, c=high, d=very, showing their hierarchical dependency through the branching. The reason for the inclusion of the number 5 is unclear.

James Brown (±1790-1855, not the musician) was a productive but crazy grammarian from Philadelphia. Starting in 1826 he used sensible concepts like "sectioning" (~constituency) and "scanning" (~dependency), alas buried in absurd terminology and dismissive rants. This syntax tree is from 1840.

Why would you pronounce Tokyo with three syllables? Poor to-ki-yo 😉

Yep, looks like it is redundant, but I have no idea what their further plans are

It’s not really an alternative to glottolog: they seem to only use the codes. Unfortunately there are no links to glottolog, because then it would be a nice front end to the more detailed research data there, especially the sources/doculects (to drop this term here once more, see good/cysouw 2013 😉)

Check the link in the post for the sentence that is represented in the picture. The sentence is also in the alt-text.

*Satzbild* by Rahn & Pfleiderer (1953) for a long and complex German sentence. The analysis is way to simple to uncover the complex structure of the example: Er wußte wohl, daß er von diesem Leben nicht mehr viel zu erwarten hatte, und war entschlossen, es wegzuwerfen, wenn er damit den Menschen dienen konnte; aber wer die bewundernswerte Sorgfalt seiner Arbeit sah, konnte nicht auf den Gedanken kommen, dieser Mann habe mit dem Leben abgeschlossen, und wenn er durch die Gassen des Städtchens schritt, bot er mit seinem gebräunten Antlitz, seinen fröhlich lachenden Augen und seinem aufrechten Gang eher das Bild eines Jünglings, der an der Schwelle des Lebens steht, als das eines Mannes, gegen den der Tod schon die Hand ausreckt.

Fritz Rahn (1891–1964) and Wolfgang Pfleiderer (1877-1971) in the 1950s wrote *Deutsche Spracherziehung*. It has a very simple graphical method, squares for main clauses and circles for subordinate clauses. It does not help to grasp the complexity of long sentences.

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

In the right direction! Where ist the main clause? Check the alt text for the complete original sentence

analyse logique from Lanusse & Yvon (1923: 227) for the following sentence (which is a nice sign of the times): Puisque nos soldats, pendant qu’ils soutenaient contre les Allemands des luttes si cruelles, ont montré que les Français sont doués des plus belles qualités militaires, il est légitime que nous ayons confiance dans l’avenir de notre pays; mais il est nécessaire que nous pratiquions dans la paix les vertus de discipline dont les combattants nous ont donné l’exemple. The arrow in the top middle is wrong: it should be reversed, pointing from the main clauses 4+6 to the subordinate clause 1. All other arrows point towards the subordinate clause.

Maxime Lanusse (1853-1930) and Henri Yvon (1873-1963) in 1921 write *Cours complet de grammaire française*. The examples still reflect the war. AFAIK this is the first graphical display of an *analyse logique* in the French grammatical tradition. (spot the error!)

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

Arête de poisson ‘fishbone diagram’ from Georges Galichet (1947: 164) for an examples from La Fontaine: Un mourant qui comptait plus de cent ans de vie, se plaignait à la Mort, que précipitamment elle le contraignait de partir tout à l’heure.

Georges Galichet (1904-1992) wrote many French textbooks, starting with *Essai de grammaire psychologique* (1947). He uses idiosyncratic graphical syntactic analyses throughout his work, starting in 1947 with an *arête de poisson* ‘fishbone diagram’. Read more:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...

😬

Syntactic analysis by Mikuš (1952), including a full set of rewrite rules (bottom), distinguishing head (T) from dependent (T'). Endpoints of the recursion are printed in italics. The resulting structure is given here using hierarchical brackets, but Mikuš uses various other graphical representations of this structure

Radivoj Francis Mikuš (1906-1983) from Ljubjana wrote various innovative syntactic papers in the 1950s, including a full example of rewrite rules in 1952, without knowledge of Harris (1946) and before the first such proposals by Chomsky. Read more about Mikuš here:

cysouw.github.io/graphicalgra...