I'm preparing materials for an undergrad grammar course this summer, and
I'd like to use RK diagrams for at least some of it.  Does anyone know
of software that will easily produce RK diagrams?  I've tried various
combinations of drawing functions and text boxes, in both Word and
Excel, and I haven't found anything that works very well.  The obvious
problems are combining lines with text and putting text on diagonal
lines.  The necessary functions just don't work well together for this.

Picking up on our months old discussion of the grammatical status of
"that", I've also been looking at Kolln and Funk's Understanding English
Grammar (6th), and I can see how RK diagrams virtually force one to
treat "that" as a NP in relative clauses, all syntactic, morphological,
and phonological arguments to the contrary.  I wonder, though, why they
call "that" introducing a nominal clause an "expletive" rather than a
subordinating conjunction, unless they require that subordinating
conjunctions represent some major grammatical category like NP, PP,
AdjP, or AdvP.  Although I suppose a relative clause with "that" could
be represented like an asyndetic relative, with the dotted line
connecting to "X" in some grammatical relation and "that" above the verb
of the relative clause connected also by a dotted line.  And why are
there no RK diagrams in Chapter 8, on Sentence Modifiers?  The reason
given is that RK provides no way to do this, but this strikes me as an
excellent opportunity to create one, an option grammarians have, since
there appears to be no widely accepted authority on diagrammaing. 

Herb

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