Syntax resources

Mentioned in section

• phpSyntaxTree is a free website which generates trees as images. You type your tree as bracketed structures, e.g. [top left right].
• The bottom-up approach is to start by labelling each word.

[Adv never] [V trust] [Det those] [N syntacticians]


• Then you add layers around the outside one at a time, e.g. [N'...].


[VP [Adv never] [V' [V trust] [NP [Det those] [N' [N syntacticians]]]]]

• The top-down approach is to paste and fill in XP templates recursively.


[XP [Specifier word] [X' [X word] Complement ]]

• This method can’t do line breaks within a node. Just use I-Pst or C+Q.
• Check frequently by hitting the Draw button.
• Save the code somewhere in case you need to change your tree later.
• You can change settings, e.g. font, font size, color.
• You can add arrows later in Word using the Drawing toolbar.
• For more complex examples, see the answers for handout 11.5.
• There are other ways to draw trees. I think they’re more troublesome.
   
• Recursion at Wikipedia, illustrated by the image below.



Center embedding is a type of linguistic recursion which is limited by our processing abilities.

• Not mentioned in section, but should have been: a report on excessive center embedding from The Speculative Grammarian (the one and only journal of satirical linguistics).

Other resources

• The Oxford English Dictionary can often help you work out whether something is a preposition or an adverb.
• Synthinar, The Syntactic Theory Seminar. How exciting can a bunch of lecture transcripts be? Well, they’re wonderful because he actually explains the history and assumptions behind current syntactic theory. Just in case that’s an itch you need to scratch.

Any suggestions for other links?