We’re going to have plenty of opportunities to draw trees during the rest of the semester. If you wish to produce your trees electronically, you have a couple of options.

Here is the easiest I think: Go to http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/ and enter the specification of your tree in labeled bracket notation. They have an example to get you started. They don’t look beautiful, but they don’t look bad. Once it has generated the tree, you can drag the picture into your Word document. One note: On homework #2, you are asked to create a tree from bracket notation. This site won’t exactly do your homework for you, because it requires a little bit of tweaking to get it to come out right. So, know what the tree is supposed to look like, and then you can use phpSyntaxTree to generate the correct picture.

Another option is to purchase the Arboreal font for $20 from Cascadilla press. This is what I used to use all the time. It provides characters for the various tree branches, and with some practice it can make drawing trees go quite quickly. I have an example Word document with the tabs set in such a way that the trees line up nicely, if you choose to go this route.

I haven’t given TreeForm any very serious testing, but it is a Java application (so it works on both Windows and Mac) that lets you drag and drop pieces of trees onto a drawing board to create your trees. A kind of similar Java applet (usable in a web browser) is The Syntax Student’s Companion, although it is a much more modest program than TreeForm.

You could draw trees right in Word by typing in the node labels and then drawing lines all over your document. I would not recommend this, though, it’ll take forever.

What do I do? For the trees that you’ll see on the handouts and in the slides, I’ve created almost all of them using LaTeX in combination with one of the tree drawing packages. If you don’t already know LaTeX, this might be too much to try to do just to get your homework assignments finished. I did a little presentation on how to use LaTeX in Linguistics at McGill about a year and a half ago, which you can take a look at. The specific tree drawing package I use almost exclusively is jTree (which is included in TeXLive). I also use the very handy little program LaTeXiT to generate trees that I can just drag into Keynote (see also a blog post I wrote about it). I am actually a pretty big fan of LaTeX over other writing options, and if you go on to write a lot of things like math or linguistics, I’d recommend becoming familiar with it.