Traditional Grammar - Extra Practice James Madison University

Instructions: These are extra sentences to use for additional diagramming practice for the final exam. There is also a list below these sentences offering some direct identification practice. All answers will be available outside my office this Friday by mid-afternoon. Please do note that while there are a range of different examples here, these extra practice sentences do not by any means cover every possible grammatical construction variation/combination you could see on the exam.

1. Will Santa bring me a new brain this year for Christmas?
2. Everyone wants Santa to bring them presents that they can exchange.
3. Some sentences are very simple to diagram.
4. Look before you leap.
5. More spiked eggnog might make it possible for the party to be a success.
6. I think it is lovely that you have started baking cookies for the homeless.
7. Shaking his head slowly, the frustrated speaker left the stage.
8. Dougie's aunt and uncle drive around the country in a camper and send him pictures of their adventures.
9. After his apron was accidently dipped into a vat of chocolate, the baker tried soaking the stains out.
10. I wonder whether lions think that dandelions look like lions.
11. Hank thought his problems would go away when he moved to Texas.
12. Am I really expected to be nice to people who do not smile if I wave to them?
13. This toothpaste neither whitens nor brightens, despite its claim that there is no better product on the market.
14. My analyst, Sigfrid, being a machine, did not actually have a personality, but he expected me to face the sources of most of my own personality problems.
15. I fear grammarians and other strange creatures and always avoid them on the street and at the university.
16. They will not forget the challenges they faced.

Also, after you diagram these sentences, but before you look at the answers, you might want to see if you can answer the following questions (noting that each sentence could contain more than one of these grammatical forms):

1. Which sentences contain infinitive phrases?
2. Which sentence contains an infinitive phrase that has a subject and is introduced by the subordinating conjunction "for"?
3. Which sentences contain participial phrases?
4. Which sentences contain noun clauses?
5. Which sentences contain adjectival clauses?
6. Which sentences contain adverbial clauses?
7. Which sentences contain gerunds?
8. Which sentences contain appositives?
9. Which sentence contains a prepositional phrase that is the complement in an SVC pattern?
10. Which sentence contains an adjective clause with an implicit relative pronoun (i.e, a "gap" in the clause).
11. Which sentences contain expletive "there" or filler "it"?
12. Which sentences contain none of the above?