how do I diagram this sentence?

Question

And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, Sit ye down here.

Answer 1

Hi Tl,

 

I'd like to help you diagram this sentence and the ones you give in your other two questions https://www.wyzant.com/resources/answers/207023/how_do_i_diagram_this_sentence and https://www.wyzant.com/resources/answers/207021/how_do_i_diagram_this_sentence, but unfortunately the format of these WyzAnt Answers text boxes isn't conducive to drawing sentence diagrams.

 

But WyzAnt's online tutoring platform has better tools for drawing diagrams, and I have an application that creates Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams quite easily which I could then show you by sharing my screen with you through the online platform (for examples of what these diagrams come out looking like, you can view some of the videos on my YouTube channels at http://youtube.com/channel/UCDKHkOFJLQPCT9nI82-wLDA and http://youtube.com/EdMcCorduck). If you might be interested in doing that, please mouse over my ugly mug up there on the right and click on the "MESSAGE ED" button in the pop-up to contact me about scheduling an online session.

 

However, at least for the sentence you give in this particular question, I can address a couple of points that might be problematic when you're trying to decide how to diagram it:

1. I hope you recognize that "Sit ye down here" is an imperative, i.e., a command, and a bit of an archaic one (it appears to be from the King James Version of Ruth 4:2) since it uses the obsolete second person plural subject pronoun ye. But this is analogous to the form of some imperatives we still use in Modern English, e.g., You shut up! (alongside Shut up!) and Don't (you) do that, and both the Early Modern English form as shown in this KJV passage and the current forms illustrate that the sometimes expressed but usually merely understood subject of most imperatives is you (EME ye), and in traditional sentence diagramming we give understood subjects on the main line like this:

         x  |  Sit
             |

 

This, with x for the unexpressed subject, is (partly) how you'd diagram a simple imperative Sit! But if the subject you is expressed, we just put it in the normal subject position to the left of the vertical line:

         ye | Sit

              |

This then is how you would at least start to diagram the principal elements of the clause Sit ye down here in this sentence (and note also how the diagram keeps the same capitalization of the sentence, i.e., the first letter of the main verb sit, not the subject ye, is capitalized).

 

2. The sentence in your question has the unusual, but certainly not unheard of, property of beginning with the conjunction "And," whereas the canonical structure of two clauses joined by a conjunction is CLAUSE CONJUNCTION CLAUSE, i.e., not CONJUNCTION CLAUSE CONJUNCTION CLAUSE (the second and in your sentence does join the first clause and the second--reduced--clause in your sentence, however). In Reed-Kellogg diagrams, conjunctions connecting clauses are written on separate lines between the separate lines for the clauses they connect, something like this (again, the constraints of these WyzAnt Answers boxes force me to simplify some things):

He took ten men of the elders of the city
        |
        |and
             |
             |
      x | said, "Sit ye down here."

But since your sentence actually begins with the conjunction And, you would diagram the whole thing like this:

 

  |

  |And

       |

       |

he took ten men of the elders of the city
       |
       |and
           |
           |
   x | said, "Sit ye down here."

That is, you'd put a "floating" conjunction and on the very first line even though it unusually has nothing to connect to above it.