How to parse

Find the verbs

The first step in parsing a sentence is to find the verbs. This is useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, the verb is the key to the whole clause – so it makes sense to get it sorted out first. Also, sentences containing multiple clauses can most easily be identified by locating all the verbs. In identifying the verbs remember that a single clause can contain up to three auxiliary verbs in addition to the lexical verb. It is the lexical verb that concerns us here.

All of the lexical verbs in the following example are marked in bold.

It can be useful to start by noticing where inflectional suffixes associated with the lexical verbs (-s, -ed, -ing, -en) appear in the sentence. But this has limitations as a strategy since (i) some verbs do not require suffixes (see for example leave and go in the example above), and (ii) all of these suffixes also appear on nouns for various reasons.

It is also useful to consider any auxiliary verbs (be, have, do and the modals can, might, will, should and so on). In this example we see the form am. This is the first person singular present tense form of the auxiliary verb be.

Consider the tense of the clause

Another useful thing to sort out in relation to the verbs is the tense of each clause. There is only one tense marked verb in our example. It is marked in bold:

Identify non-finite clauses

One of the reasons it is useful to be able to identify non-finite clauses is because non-finite clauses are always subordinate. Finding subordinate clauses makes it much easier to sort out how different elements within a sentence are related.

Non finite clauses contain non-finite verbs. These are verbs in the infinitive, present participle or past participle form that are not supported by an auxiliary. There is one infinitival verb in our example, leave. It is marked in bold:

Note that there are also examples of subordinate clauses containing finite verbs – so this procedure alone will not identify all subordinate clauses. In our example, the verb go is part of a finite subordinate clause:

Find basic constituents

The next step in parsing a clause is to see if you can identify the basic constituents and establish the transitivity type. We have established that the main verb in our example is planning (because we just noted that the other two lexical verbs are part of subordinate clauses). What is the transitivity of planning and what are the basic constituents it takes in our sentence?

Since our sentence is fairly complex, it can help to begin by considering the verb plan more generally. A basic clause containing plan is given below:

This clause is a transitive clause: it contains a subject (Sarah) and an object (a holiday). This same pattern occurs in our sentence. The subject (I) and object (to leave early from work) are marked in bold:

Got anything left over?

With any luck all you'll have left over is some additional adverbial information referring to the time, location or manner of the proposition. In our example, there is a subordinate clause in this function: