Through the eyes of grammar: Richard Salter Storr's (1830-1884) sentence-maps

In the nineteenth century, the teaching of grammar in the United States increasingly made use of diagrams to represent the structure of a sentence. Diagrams represent syntactic relations by means of discrete graphical elements (“reifications”) or by specific arrangements thereof on the bi-dimensional plane (“configurations”). Richard Salter Storrs, who
was a teacher in a school for deaf-mute pupils, proposed a diagrammatic system favoring reification over configuration in order to make syntactic
relations visible. Such a choice, uncommon in the U.S. at that time, has now become the most common and straightforward way of representing labeled dependencies.