Lesson 4 | The Fourth Pass: Label, Part 1
The Phrasing Relationships
We have already learned how to separate our passage into phrases (the First Pass), indent the phrases (the Second Pass), and identify relationships between subordinate and anchor phrases by adding arrows (the Third Pass). But we still need to dig down deeper into the relationships we’ve identified, and that is what the Fourth Pass is all about. This is where the “L” of our acronym DIALS comes in: we label each relationship.
We’re going to split up the labeling process into two lessons. During this lesson, we’ll look at the relationships for every phrase we label with a yellow arrow. During the next lesson, we’ll look at the specific relationships of genitive phrases.
Categories
There are three broad categories of relationships that we will study this lesson: (1) Support by Distinct Statement, (2) Support by Restatement, and (3) Support by Contrary Statement.
Cheat Sheet: The Phrasing RelationshipspdfThis cheat sheet lists all the relationships you're about to learn, organized in their three categories. Plus, each relationship has a list of the types of phrases commonly used by that relationship—the types of phrases you learned in the first lesson, like Unmarked, Prepositional, and so on. That is extremely helpful! You should always have it at hand when you're doing the first part of the Fourth Pass.
Notes for those who have learned Arcing or Bracketing
Before we study the logical relationship in detail in the next three steps, I want to clarify a few things for those of you who have already learned Arcing or Bracketing.
First, there are several Arcing/Bracketing relationships that are not used in Phrasing.
- There are no Coordinate relationships. When a passage has a list, which is where most Coordinate relationships are seen, we don’t add arrows or identify relationships.
- Inference and Bilateral are not on the list because we only mark the relationship of the indented subordinate clause. Thus, the relationship is “Ground” whether it comes before or after the other phrase, or both.
- Situation/Response isn’t on the list because Phrasing is focused on grammar, and Sit/Resp is not indicated by grammar but solely by the logic in a passage.
In addition, there are several Phrasing relationships that are not used in Arcing/Bracketing, mostly for prepositional phrases as these are normally not arced or bracketed as separate propositions.
Finally, note that we will not be labeling relative phrases. If we did so, we would be calling them “Explanation” each time since that is their simple grammatical function.
Now take a deep breath, and let’s plunge into the specific ways subordinate phrases support their anchor phrase!