Trees

On the question of drawing trees for handing in electronically.

There are a couple of low-tech ways to do it: you could draw your trees on a piece of paper, take a photo of that piece of paper, and hand in the photo. If you do this be sure that it is readable. I have gotten some photos of homework in the past that is not very readable.

A mid-tech way to do it is: have a tablet and draw it on the tablet, and hand in the result.

If you want to actually typeset trees, I have a couple of suggestions.

One is TreeForm, which allows you to drag and drop pieces of trees onto a canvas, and then save the result. It’s possible to do most of what you want, though you really kind of need to have planned it out ahead of time by drawing it on a piece of paper. It’s a bit difficult to work with.

Another, which is moderately high-tech, is to typeset then in LaTeX. There’s a kind of easy way to do this by signing up for an account on Overleaf (the account is free for small single authored projects). You can then type this into a project file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{qtree}
\usepackage{tree-dvips}
\begin{document}

\Tree [.TP \node{SpecTP}{SUBJ_k} [.T\1 T [.VP \node{SpecVP}{$t$_k} [.V\1 V OBJ ]]]]
\anodecurve[bl]{SpecVP}[b]{SpecTP}{0.3in}

\end{document}

Click on “Menu” and change compiler to “LaTex” (not “pdfLaTeX”), and then if need be click “Recompile”. You should see a tree in the right side of the screen, that you can save as a PDF.

It’s actually pretty powerful. It uses qtree to draw the trees, and then tree-dvips to draw the arrows. For more in-depth documentation of qtree see qtree and for using arrows with qtree see Arrows in LaTeX using dvips

The way I do the homework and handouts is with an even more complex LaTeX tree-drawing package called pst-jtree but I won’t try to introduce that here.