ìI really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.î

That's Gertrude Stein. More on the fun and games of the diagram at Kitty Burns Florey.

Doesn't Stein say something to the effect that nouns and adjectives operate in a vertical plane while verbs operate in a horizontal plane? I remember reading about this (although I may have gotten it backwards just now) while digging into semiotics. Seems as if Stein's sentence diagrams would be--well, more perplexing than most!

I seem to recall seeing that line somewhere in Stein's How To Write. Here are some more intriguing quotes from the same:

"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that and nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns." (231)

"Remember a sentence should not have a name. A name is familiar. A sentence should not be familiar. All names are familiar there for there should not be a name in a sentence. If there is a name in a sentence a name which is familiar makes a data and therefor there is no equilibrium." (166)

Early in my graduate career I wrote a paper -- utterly unpublishable, of course -- where I diagrammed a bunch of Stein's "meta-sentences" (i.e., sentences about sentence-writing). I had fun in particular with the second quote above. Maybe it's time to post excerpts of the paper on my blog?

Ar-r-r-r-gh!

The problem with diagramming sentences is that it's been done wrong ever since the beginning.

I'll never forget, however, my first serious English teacher, Miss Hantlemann, whose sentences started with "Oliver eats onions" and went on from there.

Space here doesn't permit a full exposition of how it really should be done, but the short answer is that the diagram - in order to be meaningful - should model syntax (and here I may even have to throw everything to the winds and invoke Chomsk's "Aspects").

Ms Florey's "The dog barked" would come out in a tree form (upside-down), with "barked" at the top (verb), a branch down to the left to "dog" (subject), and an empty branch down to the right (the verb's intransitive). "The" would come under dog, along with whatever attributes there are (big, brown, Rottweiler, Mrs Murphy's...)

I think that an advantage of this system is that it simplifies Proustian (or Faulknerian) sentences, by pulling out straightaway the verbs in the multiple phrases.

I have to amit that it's been a long time since I diagrammed any sentence at all.

The kind of useless "knowledge" whose only function is to torment schoolchildren.

Evelyn Waugh is a propos here:

I have never read Latin for pleasure and should now be hard put to compose a simple epitaph. But I do not regret my superficial classical studies. I believe that the conventional defence of them is valid; that only by them can a boy fully understand that a sentence is a logical construction and that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. . . . The old-fashioned test of an English sentence--will it translate [into Latin] --still stands after we have lost the trick of translation.î