@kefnerd-godofknowledge replied to your chat:
Makes sense to me. You're saying that the discussion needs to be on the system that allows for and causes bullying instead of the bully, right?
Yes, but my point was more about syntactic structure. The entire spiel is literally a single sentence.
Note how âthe purposeful-or-not omission of broader systemic violence from discussions of bullying and blaming it instead on the a priori inherent evil of the bulliesâ is just the subject of the verb âcausesâ. And how the other argument of said verb is itself a new clause. And how there is an oblique clause starting it in âto apply his point to bullyingâ. And how âredirect discussions about the actual systemic causes of bullyingâ and âinstead reinforce it as generically badâ are the coordinated arguments of the âcausesâ clause.
True, it doesnât have any garden path processing or even central embedding, but itâs still an unwieldy sentence in terms of syntactic processing. I tried to diagram it several time, but the process of hammering in the clauses in order became gibbering after it started looking like this:
(@ budding young linguists: real talk tho, phpSyntaxTree is your best friend bookmark it yesterday; plus it works best if you do the brackets first and then fill in, which is good practice for writing code)
And as a linguist-cum-writer, Iâd say that one never wants to describe writing as âunwieldyâ. 1/10. Bad sentence. Would not recommend.















