diagram this 94-word sentence

As a onetime Comp. Lit. minor, I'll try to help ZachsMind and put this in English. "Originally, the http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/structuralism.html movement (i.e. early 20th-century Marxist critics, particularly http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/general/bldef_althusserlouis.htm) argued that social relationships were governed by power expressed in the form of capital. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ As a theory this was found to be too rigid and did not express how power relationships changed over time. Critics in the http://www.philosopher.org.uk/poststr.htm began to look at how social relationships hinged particularly on http://reconstruction.eserver.org/022/hegemony.htm, bringing a more dynamic understanding of how these social relationships can be analyzed." It's not really a bad sentence, it just contains a passel of post-structuralist jargon that can throw you if you don't understand how the terms have been http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/diffr.html for use in that theoretical system. To be honest, most post-structuralist writing exploits terminology in ways that make an average sentence about these concepts opaque. I could go into how this is a broad philosophical pun, in that the writing itself articulates power in ways that are all but impossible to understand without a full, exhaustive grounding in the discipline, which is almost impossible to get without buying into the political basis of it all, thus writings about power are demonstrating the very ideas they describe. But most people wouldn't care ...

Just to emphasize what demiurge said, this has nothing to do with linguists—sentence diagramming is a staple of old-school grammar classes, which were of course taught by English teachers, not linguists (and English teachers very rarely know the first thing about linguistics, which is why it's so depressing to know the first thing about linguistics and have to put up with what people say about language). Nothing wrong with diagramming—it's a pleasant and soothing activity, like knitting—it's just not something linguists do.

That won a bad sentence contest? That sentence is great! It sounds like Lovecraft covering Marx.

I get down on my knees and thank god every single day that I have never, thus far, spent 1 precious millisecond of my existence learning or practicing the art of diagramming a sentence. Now, as I daily bend my knee to express my gratitude to the lord for this small miracle, I shall also give thanks that I have never been impelled to read whatever article or book that ghastly, nay, horrific sentence came from. Thank you metafilter, for teaching me to appreciate my life.

ertain - 10 lines could never give an intelligible overview of any of the more modern theories. As a general term they are sometimes referred to as http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=%22unification+grammar%22&btnG=Google+Search. I was going to point you to a good online linguistics paper that uses Construction Grammar, but I found it has been removed. So, go to an academic library and find http://www.lsadc.org/info/language/751.html#kay In a formal nutshell, most non UG theories consist of 1) structures and 2) rules that generate, transform, decorate, constrain, filter, or do something else to the structures. Some UG theories contain only structures (sometimes with inheritance) - the monotonic "unification" of which achieves everything done in other theories by phrase-structure rules, transformations, constraints, principles, redundancy rules, etc. hattifattener: While some UG theories restrict themselves to DAGs there is no inherant reason a structure can't contain cycles and I've seen some examples that are much simpler that way (sorry but I don't have any references handy). With cycles you no longer have a hierarchy.

Do kids still diagram in school, or has whole-language, etc, killed it off?

I love you, hive mind.

Thanks, MonkeySaltedNuts—third paragraph of your first link is exactly what I was looking for.

Whole-language etc. has done a number on the teachers. The best (and nearly the only) grammar teacher I had growing up was just barely able to teach us diagramming. The second-best could identify gerunds and participles, but could not clearly explain the difference; likewise she could identify passive voice, and had been properly inculcated with the terror thereof, but she couldn't explain it well enough to tell us what it was when she said not to use it. So instead she told us to avoid be entirely, and I wrote in e-prime for a year. Actually, I snuck two copulas past her, when it would have been really, really barbarous to do otherwise. And then I took two years of Latin and got some idea what was what, just in time for the Latin teacher to retire and nobody else in the district to be competent to teach it. So yeah, I'd say the ability to explicitly discuss the grammar of a language is mostly no longer conveyed in U.S. schools.