Graphical Grammar: a history of visual analysis of syntactic structure before Chomsky and Tesnière
Radical-open-access manuscript in progress: https://cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/
Michael Cysouw
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A real grammatical tree this time!
Found in the *Common School Grammar* from 1862 by David Tower (1808-1868) as available at id.lib.harvard.edu/curiosity/re...
This approach from Picket was adapted by William Livingston in his 1817 *English grammar*. Nothing is known about this person, but it might be the son of the Founding Father by the same name. If right, then William Livingston lived 1754–1817.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.4.1
Abraham Heußler (1803-1855) from Basel in 1840 wrote *Kurzer Abriss der deutschen Sprachlehre*. In a revision he adds a *Satz-analyse* showing the embedding hierarchy with indentation. The use of letters is taken over by John Morell in Great Britain.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec4.3.9
This example of Foerster & Steadman is quote verbatim in (of all places) a Chinese grammar by Li Jinxi (黎锦熙, 1890-1978), written in 1924. The only change that Li Jinxi has made is a more accurate tree, which now precisely illustrates the grammatical structure of the example sentence.
Albert Picket (1771-1850) was a teacher and ran his own school in Manhattan and later in Cincinnati. In 1815 he wrote *The juvenile instructor* which includes grammar. To indicate government and agreement he proposes to use lines between the words.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.4.2
Hugh Doherty (???-1891) was a revolutionary Fourierist. In 1841, in the midst of his activism, he managed to also write an English grammar. He uses an analysis "in the form of a tree": the primary parts are a "trunk" and the auxiliary parts are "branches"
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.6.1
Li Jinxi (黎锦熙, 1890-1978) wrote *New grammar of the national language* (新著国语文法) in 1924. He used US-style diagramming (圖解法 *tújiě fǎ*) for the analysis of Chinese sentences. The book has seen many revisions and reprints up to the 21st century.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec6.14.1
Norman Foerster (1887–1972) and John Steadman (1889-1945) wrote *Sentences and Thinking* in 1919. They use a tree to illustrate the structure of sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. Unfortunately, it only approximates the grammatical structure.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.7.3
John Daniel Morell (1816-1891) was an inspector of schools and introduced the grammatical analysis of Ferdinand Becker to Great Britain in 1852. Morell probably saw this approach while studying philosophy, including a year under Fichte in Bonn in 1841.
cysouw.github.io/graphicalgrammar/#sec5.3.3
