Syntactic Tree Diagram

For this session, we were asked to create two tree diagram for syntax. Therefore I had created two sentences. My first sentence was "His younger brother, Micah, saw Bob with a beautiful lady recently" This sentences was composed by two parts which were noun phrase “His younger brother, Micah” and also verb phrase “saw Bob with a beautiful lady recently”. My second sentence was “The teacher at the school gave an exam with 50 questions”. After that, we were required to exchange the question of syntactic tree diagram with our friends.

For me, it was very good activity for us to improve our proficiency in English Language. Through the activity, I could learn on how to mark other’s work. It was because I had to mark and check my friend’s answer by my own without the interference of lecturer. When I was checking and correcting my friend’s work, at the same time I was learning too. I could indirectly improve my proficiency in English. Not only that, this activity gave the opportunity to learn from and to teach on another.

Through my observation, syntactic tree diagram gave a clear representation of the syntactic makeup of a sentence. We could see how the meaningful sentences were composed by combining many words from same or different word classes. The composition of words followed the rules. It meant that we could not arrange the word freely without considering the rules.

Personally, I had no problem with tree diagram. I had learned about tree diagram of syntax during my foundation year. But it was all about morphology of Malay Language. Besides, I had learned grammar, specifically on word classes, word phrases and so forth during my foundation too. Thank you very much, Madam Hairani ! Because of her, I managed to understand and identify the word classes of words, word phrases, word clause and so on. . It was very important to know about all of these things since it was very useful in syntactic analysis.  If I did not master all of these things, it will become difficult for me to understand and create the tree diagram.