Paper and pencil work fine, but how can you draw your trees electronically?

When I’m using Word, I usually do this with the help of Arboreal. This is a $20 font that you can use to draw the tree branches. If you have the font, I have an example document that demonstrates the style I have set up to make tree drawing quite fast. If you do this, you still need to draw the movement arrows in using Word’s drawing tools (unless you want to use the square arrows that Arboreal provides).

More recently, I’ve been using LaTeX (usually via LaTeXiT) to draw the trees. More specifically, I’ve been using John Frampton’s pst-jtree package to do it. But if don’t already know LaTeX, it’s got a pretty steep learning curve.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this might be to use phpSyntaxTree, which is a web page where you can go, type in labeled brackets, and have it draw the tree for you as a png image. The resulting trees aren’t super-elegant, but they’re not bad. And, again, you have to draw the arrows in yourself.

Using phpSyntaxTree, you can draw the sentence “Pat might have been eating lunch” from the last class handout using these brackets, for example:

[TP [NP Pat] [T' [T+M might] [MP <might> [PerfP [Perf have] [ProgP [Prog be] [vP <Pat> [v' [v+V eat] [VP <eat> [NP lunch]]]]]]]]]

This yields:

The actual tree on the handout was produced with LaTeX. If you want to see how I did it, you can email me (I don’t want to post it here, it looks too frightening).