two sentence analysis and tree structures

[Frank Antonson]

Well, I am not quite ready to give up on "soon" ever being an adjective. Here in the USA, members of the University of Oklahoma are known as the "sooners", a name which derived from a "sooner clause" (wikipedia explains it).

Could the word only be an adjective in the comparative degree?

For me, in any case, the interest in this discussion relates back to the R-K ing of that original sentence. At present, I am still with Haylee in calling "soon" a predicate adjective. Replacing "was" with "occurred" in order to make "soon" an adverb seems to me to be a bit of a "cop out".

 

[philo2009]

There does appear to be a semi-archaic/dialectal use of 'soon' as an adjective, but the style of the original sentence at issue hardly supports that kind of reading. As far as general, contemporary standard English is concerned, I think it relatively safe to assert that 'soon' is exclusively adverbial.

 

[Frank Antonson]

That may be right, but I am still trying to think of an example. If a track runner starts before the gun, his was a start that was too soon. It was a " too early" start but I guess not a "too soon" start Maybe the lexical territory has been first shared and then taken over by "early".

I will look back at Haylee's ideas and see how the sentence would be R-K -ed with "soon" as an adverb. If you convert "was" into an intransitive action verb like "occurred", the problem is solved. But is the verb "to be" ever considered an action verb? In the '60's there were those " be-in's" when you just went there and WERE, or did you BE ? "The went there and 'BE-ED'"!

 

[philo2009]

If you convert "was" into an intransitive action verb like "occurred", the problem is solved.

I feel we are getting sidetracked with some rather needless transformations here!

In what is essentially a straightforward cleft sentence

It was soon after leaving college that I finally bought an instrument of my own.

prepositional phrase 'after leaving college' adverbially complements 'was', with 'soon' serving simply as a submodifier specifying at what point in time after leaving college the event of the subsequent clause occurred.

How a word in that position could ever be reckoned anything other than an adverb is beyond me!!

 

[Frank Antonson]

Could you diagram that sentence according to Reed-Kellogg? I would like to see what it would look like. I must check to see if Reed-Kellogg acknowledges the adverb equivalent of a predicate adjective.

When I have time, I will try to diagram the sentence.