Sample Tree Diagram Process

 Let’s begin with a sample sentence, from Pinker’s The Language Instinct.

In 1066, William the Conqueror, known as Guillame le Batard in French because of his dubious parentage, invaded Britain and brought with him the Norman dialect of French, which became the dialect of the ruling class.

A tree diagram starts by dividing the sentence into the subject and predicate, just as you would when you start identifying sentence constituents:

In 1066, William the Conqueror, known as Guillame le Batard in French because of his dubious parentage,

invaded Britain and brought with him the Norman dialect of French, which became the dialect of the ruling class.

We can represent this as a simple NP + VP (dividing the branches between the subject and predicate):

We’ll move the initial prepositional phrase to the VP side of the sentence because it is adverbial (you can tell because of its mobility: only adverbials can move around in a sentence).

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