[Grammar] SVO pattern help

[Greg Pyszczek]

Hello, I have been experiencing great difficulty with SVO pattern labelling in complex sentences. I have been stumped numerous times by questions from my ESL teacher colleagues who really depend on this to understand some of the case studies we work with.
Here is the most recent sentence I had trouble explaining:
"A space rich in real life interactions will always be favoured over a room of phone lit faces mindlessly scrolling".
How can I mark the, subject, verb and object relationship in this? Also, can I separate this into multiple clauses somehow to simplify it?

I discussed this with my senior and marked it up as follows:
"A space S <-(rich in real life interactions)/ will always be favoured V / over a room of (phone lit faces O mindlessly scrolling C) "
I'm not really sure if this is right though.
I found the news article that the sentence was taken from if you need the full context;
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...the-hotels-confiscating-willing-guests-phones

 

[5jj]

A space rich in real life interactions
will always be favoured
over a room of phone-lit faces (that are mindlessly scrolling)

The first line is the full subject, a noun phrase.
The second line is the full verb, a verb phrase.
There is no direct object.
The third line is a preposition phrase.

The sentence can be broken down further, but that's a start.

 

[jutfrank]

Remember that not all sentences include an object. Far from it, in fact.

The idea of SVO, SOV, OSV, etc. is merely a way to classify and distinguish languages by their basic structural type. English is classed as an SVO language but that doesn't mean all its sentences follow that word order.

 

[Phaedrus]

Hello, I have been experiencing great difficulty with SVO pattern labelling in complex sentences. . . .Here is the most recent sentence I had trouble explaining:
"A space rich in real life interactions will always be favoured over a room of phone lit faces mindlessly scrolling".

Nice sentence! It is a passive clause. Direct objects are never found in passive clauses. What would be the direct object of the verb is the subject of a passive clause.

active: [People] will always favor [a space rich in real-life interactions] over [a room of phone-lit faces mindlessly scrolling].
passive: [A space rich in real-life interactions] will always be favored (by people) over [a room of phone-lit faces mindlessly scrolling].

More simply:

active: People will always favor this over that.
passive: This will always be favored (by people) over that.

 

[Tdol]

"A space rich in real life interactions will always be favoured over a room of phone lit faces mindlessly scrolling"

Forget the grammar and focus on the wisdom.</oldbore> ;-)