PG asked ChatGPT4 to do something with the first line from The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed.
Prompt: Diagram the following sentences: ‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen.” The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless and winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin’s Milk Bar as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps, their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones.”
ChatGPT4: To diagram the given sentence, we’ll break it down into its constituent parts, focusing on the main clauses, subordinate clauses, phrases, and key parts of speech. The sentence can be diagrammed as follows:
- Main Clause: “The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless”
- Subject: “The announcer’s voice”
- Verb: “crackles”
- Prepositional Phrase: “from the wireless”
- Subordinate Clause: “as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps”
- Conjunction: “as”
- Adverb describing how the voice crackles: “sinuously”
- Comparative Conjunction: “as”
- Subject: “the fog”
- Verb: “curls”
- Prepositional Phrase: “around the mournful street lamps”
- Additional Phrase: “their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones”
- Possessive Pronoun: “their”
- Subject: “wan glow”
- Verb: “illuminating”
- Direct Object: “the cobblestones”
- Adverb modifying the verb: “barely”
- Independent Sentences: “‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen.'”
- These are two separate declarative sentences.
- Contextual Setting: “winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin’s Milk Bar”
- Verb: “winds”
- Prepositional Phrase: “around the rapt patrons”
- Prepositional Phrase: “of Berlin’s Milk Bar”
In this diagram, each part of the sentence is broken down to show the structure and how different elements are connected. This visualization helps in understanding the grammatical structure and the relationships between different parts of the sentence.
END ChatGPT4
PG will leave the task of assessing how the AI did on this challenge to visitors who still remember what a “Direct Object” is. He doesn’t remember Mrs. Lascelles ever saying anything about “contextual settings.”
PG was expecting to receive a graphical diagram to be created by the prompt, like the following example:
PG speculates that the AI doesn’t have the ability to output graphic diagrams. (Yet)