FIFTH METHOD OF ANALYSIS.

The best and most thorough method of analysis is that of COMPLETE SYNTACTICAL PARSING; a method which, for the sake of order and brevity, should ever be kept free from all mixture of etymological definitions or reasons, but which may be preceded or followed by any of the foregoing schemes of resolution, if the teacher choose to require any such preliminary or subsidiary exposition.  This method is fully illustrated in the Twelfth Praxis below.

OBSERVATIONS ON METHODS OF ANALYSIS.

OBS. 1.—­The almost infinite variety in the forms of sentences, will sometimes throw difficulty in the way of the analyzer, be his scheme or his skill what it may.  The last four or five observations of the preceding series have shown, that the distinction of sentences as simple or compound, which constitutes the chief point of the First Method of Analysis above, is not always plain, even to the learned.  The definitions and examples which I have given, will make it generally so; and, where it is otherwise, the question or puzzle, it is presumed, cannot often be of much practical importance.  If the difference be not obvious, it can hardly be a momentous error, to mistake a phrase for an elliptical clause, or to call such a clause a phrase.

OBS. 2.—­The Second Method above is, I think, easier of application than any of the rest; and, if other analysis than the regular method of parsing seem desirable, this will probably be found as useful as any.  There is, in many of our popular grammars, some recognition of the principles of this analysis—­some mention of “the principal parts of a sentence,” in accordance with what are so called above,—­and also, in a few, some succinct account of the parts called “adjuncts;” but there seems to have been no prevalent practice of applying these principles, in any stated or well-digested manner.  Lowth, Murray, Alger, W. Allen, Hart, Hiley, Ingersoll, Wells, and others, tell of these “PRINCIPAL PARTS;”—­Lowth calling them, “the agent, the attribute, and the object;” (Gram., p. 72;)—­Murray, and his copyists, Alger, Ingersoll, and others, calling them, “the subject, the attribute, and the object;”—­Hiley and Hart calling them, “the subject or nominative, the attribute or verb, and the object;”—­Allen calling them, “the nominative, the verb, and (if the verb is active,) the accusative governed by the verb;” and also saying, “The nominative is sometimes called the subject; the verb, the attribute; and the accusative, the object;”—­Wells calling them, “the subject or nominative, the verb, and the object;” and also recognizing the “adjuncts,” as a species which “embraces all the words of