Avy,

OK, I did some research but I'm not certain I understand phrase tree structure (PTS) very well. It's about linguistics, something that has never interested me very much.

Here's a paper that gives a pretty good nuts and bolts description of PTS.

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~uffmann/psr-tree.pdf

You have to get past the use of two for to in the first sentence, though. I had to grit my teeth because I always have a tendency to dismiss anything that follows so egregious an error. In this case I gave allowance for the fact that someone may have translated this into English or else the person has English as a secondary language.

Notwithstanding, a few paragraphs down there is a PTS of a relatively simple sentence, with some explanation. It shows the inter-relationships among the words in the sentence. It does NOT reflect or teach grammar. And that's what diagramming or parsing a sentence does. The PTS is concerned with highly technical linguistics, principally the relationships between pairs of words or phrases, while diagramming teaches one how to build a good understandable sentence. Diagramming concerns the entire sentence as a structure. Gosh I hope I said that correctly.

Eleventy seven people may now step forward to correct me on this, which is fine by me since if I have misstated the technical nature of PTS I expect to be questioned.


TEd