dramatica sentence structure

July 14, 2005

Chris reminded me of something today that I always thought was interesting.

Remember the basic Dramatica quad? Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire - (which can be represented by Mass, Energy, Space, and Time, etc.) Well, you can also examine the structure of sentence in the same way.

Again, as usual, this is a narrow left minded way of looking at sentence structure. That’s where I’m predominantly based, so I tend to like to break things up into pieces. I’m not even sure how I would start describing it from a Female Mental Sex perspective.

So if you take the four basic elements of a sentence - nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs - you can quite easily fit them into the Dramatica quad. Nouns are the mass of a sentence and verbs represent the energy.

Adverbs and adjectives are modifiers of nouns and verbs - or Companion pairs. (See that link above again if you don’t know what companion pairs are). Adjectives are a companion to nouns - they describe the spatial differences between words. Adverbs are a companion to verbs and help modify verbs in a time sense. Quickly, suddenly, quietly - these feel time based. Whereas smelly, bulbous, and shiny feel more space based.

Not sure what practical application it has except that it’s cool!