 |
|
SPOCA analysis and what it can show
Task B - Our analysis (line 1)
|
A
|
A
|
S
|
P
|
O
|
|
Yesterday
|
upon the stair
|
I
|
met
|
a man who wasn't there.
|
Firstly, we can note that, unusually, the two adverbials both come before
the subject, and occur in the order they do in order to make the rhyme
scheme work. This use of unusual syntax to conform to rhyme schemes is
one aspect of what is sometimes called 'poetic grammar'.
Secondly, there is a peculiar relationship between the head noun ('man')
of the object noun phrase and the relative clause 'who wasn't there' post-modifying
it. Post-modifiers usually delimit the referent of head noun (for example
to avoid ambiguity - compare 'the boy in blue' vs. 'the boy with blonde
hair'). But in this case the content of the post-modifier tells us that
the assumed referent was not present, thus preventing the usual way of
'reading' relative clauses. Note that this also produces a semantic clash
between the predicator 'met' and its object. You can't meet someone who
is not present (and may not exist at all). This nursery rhyme is clearly
an early example of the nonsense verse tradition which includes people
like Edwin Lear and Ogden Nash. [Dawn: links?] Though, given current critical
fashion, if it had been written in the last ten years, it might well have
been described grandiloquently by literary critics as a postmodern text!
Note that to provide a complete grammatical analysis of this sentence
we would need to analyse the structure of the relative clause and also
the structure of the phrases. To show you this, we have provided a 'tree
diagram' of the sentence below (called trees because they have branches,
rather like trees, though to be honest they look more like upside-down
bushes to us!).
|
