Making Syntactic Trees Quickly
Bruce
Hayes
Department of Linguistics
UCLA
This page describes how you can make syntactic trees pretty fast, using free software.
The directions assume a Windows computer, but I suspect that adapting them to other machines would not be problematic.
Overview:
1. Download and open spreadsheet
Download this spreadsheet: TreeMaker.xls
You can open it with Microsoft Excel, or with the free Open Office software if you don't want to use the Microsoft product.
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2. Enter Content
Enter the words of your tree on the top line, starting in the second cell.
Enter the syntactic category (Noun, Verb, etc.) of each word in the cell immediately below it.
Where a syntactic phrase (NP, S, VP, etc.) begins, enter its label in the cell below the first word of the phrase. Put more deeply embedded nodes higher up on the spreadsheet. An initial S is given already to save you effort.
Where a syntactic phrase ends, put ] in the cell below its last word.
For the sentence Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, the spreadsheet will look like this:
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3. Grab the
spreadsheet output
The spreadsheet will add in the right brackets for individual words, put in the left brackets, and arrange everything in sequence on Line 14. Not everything is necessarily visible, but this doesn't matter.
Use the mouse to highlight the material for your sentence in Row 14:
and press Ctrl c (for "copy").
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4.
Visit the Web-based tree-making
utility
Now get on the Web and visit this site:
http://www.ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/
which is an already-usable (no installation needed) version of a marvellous program called phpSyntaxTree.
You will see a window like this:
Use the mouse to highlight the material shown:
Type Ctrl v to replace the highlighted material with what you did on the spreadsheet:
If you didn't put in your brackets perfectly, you can edit this window. Usually, you forgot to put in enough right brackets at the end. Just type them in until "open brackets" is the same value as "Closed brackets". Then click on the Draw button, and you will see:
If your tree isn't right, you can edit the brackets and labels in the little window and try again. For complicated trees sometimes it takes a bit of effort to get it right.
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4. Format your
tree
As you can see above, there is a menu that lets you can change the tree in various ways: you can add a serif font, make it black and white, get rid of those little subscripts. (Triangles will cover unstructured word strings, which you can put into a single cell in the spreadsheet.) Here is a reformatted version:
Your format settings will be remembered by phpSyntaxTree for later trees you draw.
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5. Import your
image into a word processor
Right-click on your new tree and select Save Picture As. In Windows, if you don't specify an alternative, it saves it as untitled.bmp in the My Pictures folder. Open the file with Paint (usually found at: C:\WINDOWS\system32\mspaint.exe) or some other image editor, and copy the whole image (in Paint: Ctrl a, then Ctrl c). Lastly, go to the spot in your document where you want the tree to be and paste it in, in most word processors using Ctrl v.
Two further speed-ups:
Put a shortcut to untitled.bmp on your desktop, making it easy to find; see this link for how.
Set Paint (or some other image editor) as the program that automatically opens .bmp files; see this link for how.
I find that with a little practice I can do trees this way quite a bit faster than if I try to draw the lines myself.
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6. Feedback
Please let me know if these directions can be improved (email address is at my home page), or if there are other ways you know of that can speed tree-creation.