Textbooks of the latest “Government and Binding” version of the Transformational Grammar theory rarely even mention how to diagram a sentence with a conjunction like and. There is considerable debate in graduate school classes about how conjunction could be represented and still maintain the binary branching of the latest GB theory. What ought to be a simple “2 + 2" kind of diagram has become a difficult problem, probably because what should be an operator (the + sign) has been transformed into a specialized node in a phrase structure grammar. 

Here is how TG would diagram the above sentence Two and two equals four.

  1. Cheryl A Black, 1998. A step-by-step introduction to the Government and Binding theory of syntax. p. 7. Available online at http://www.sil.org/mexico/ling/E002-IntroGB.htm. Back
Fig 8-2
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