Tree Diagrams

OBJECTIVES
At the end of this lesson, you are expected to:
• identify the different types of drawing of trees;
• recognize the dos and don’ts in drawing trees; and
• apply the grammar rules in creating tree diagram.

ACTIVITY
Direction: Parse the following sentences and identify the constituents present in each
sentence.

1. The girl who was injured in the accident is now in hospital.

2. She said you took her notes.
3. More and more money is being given to social projects, and it is reasonable to
expect that this will become a common practice.
4. I asked if I could borrow his car but he refused.
5. The medicine, which is being tried at several medical institutions, has already
helped a number of patients who have failed to respond to other remedies.
6. He was waiting for the girl, who was buying ice cream.
7. The woman who was driving the car was all dressed in black.
8. I try to ignore the noise they make in the kitchen but I simply can’t.
9. One passenger was killed and another seriously wounded.
10. When I finish this project, I will go on a week holiday in Bahamas.

ABSTRACTION
You now have the tools you need to start drawing trees from the PSRs that we have
from the previous modules. You have the rules, and you have the parts of speech. I suspect
that you’ll find drawing trees much more difficult than you expect. It takes a lot of practice
to know which rules to apply and apply them consistently and accurately to a sentence.
You won’t be able to draw trees easily until you literally do dozens of them. Drawing
syntactic trees is a learned skill that needs lots of practice, just like learning to play the
piano.

There are actually two ways to go about drawing a tree. You can start at the bottom
and work your way up to the TP, or you can start with the TP and work your way down.
Which technique you use depends upon your individual style. For most people who are
just starting out, starting at the bottom of the tree with the words works best. When you
become more practiced and experienced you may find starting at the top quicker. Below,
I give step-by-step instructions for both of these techniques.

Bottom-up Trees

This method for tree drawing often works best for beginners. Here are some
(hopefully helpful) steps to go through when drawing trees.

1. Write out the sentence and identify the parts of speech:

D Adv Adj N V D N
The very small boy kissed the platypus.

2. Identify what modifies what. Remember the modification relations. If the word
modifies something, then it is contained in the same constituent as that thing.
 Very modifies small. Very small modifies boy. The modifies boy. The modifies
platypus. The platypus modifies kissed.

3. Start linking together items that modify one another. It often helps to start at the
right edge. Always start with adjacent words. If the modifier is modifying a noun,
then the rule you must apply is the NP rule:
NP

D Adv Adj N V D N
The very small boy kissed. The platypus.

Similarly, if the word that is being modified is an adjective, then you must apply
the AdjP rule.

4. Make sure you apply the rule exactly as it is written. For example, the AdjP rule
reads AdjP → (AdvP) Adj. This means that the Adv must have an AdvP on top of
it before it can combine with the Adj.

5. Keep applying the rules until you have attached all the modifiers to the modified
constituents. Apply one rule at a time. Work from right to left (from the end of the
sentence to the beginning.) Try doing the rules in the following order:
a) AdjPs & AdvPs
b) NPs & PPs
c) VPs.
d) TP
e) If your sentence has more than one clause in it, start with the most embedded
clause.
6. When you’ve built up the subject NP and the VP, apply the TP (and if appropriate
the CP) rule:

7. This is the most important step of all: Now go back and make sure that your tree is
really generated by the rules. Check each level in the tree and make sure your rules
will generate it. If they don’t, apply the rule correctly and fix the structure.

8. Some important considerations:

a) Make sure that everything is attached to the tree.
b) Make sure that every category has only one line immediately on top of it (it
can have more than one under it, but only one immediately on top of it).
c) Don’t cross lines.
d) Make sure all branches in the tree have a part of speech label.
e) Avoid triangles.
 The Top-down Method of Drawing Trees

Most professional syntacticians use a slightly quicker means of drawing trees. Once you
are practiced at identifying the structure of trees, you will probably want to use this
technique. But be warned, sometimes this tech- nique can lead you astray if you are not
careful.

1. This method starts out the same way as the other: write out the sentence and identify the
parts of speech.
D Adv Adj N V D N
The very small boy kissed the platypus.
2. Next draw the TP node at the top of the tree, with the subject NP and VP underneath:

3. Using the NP rule, flesh out the subject NP. You will have to look ahead here. If there is
a P, you will probably need a PP. Similarly, if there is an Adj, you’ll need at least one
AdjP, maybe more. Remember the principle of modification: elements that modify one
another are part of the same constituent.

4. Fill in the AdvPs, AdjPs and PPs as necessary. You may need to do other NPs inside PPs
5. Next do constituents inside the VP, including object NPs, and any APs and PPs inside
them.

Again, the most important step is to go back and make sure that your tree obeys all the
rules, as well as the golden rule of tree structures.

6. Some important considerations:

a Make sure that everything is attached.
b Make sure that every category has only one line immediately on top of it. (It
can have more than one under it, but only one immediately on top of it.)
c Don’t cross lines.
d Make sure all branches in the tree have a part of speech label.
e Avoid triangles.

Again, I strongly recommend that you start your tree drawing using the bot- tom-up
method, but after some practice, you may find this latter method quicker.

Bracketed Diagrams

Sometimes it is preferable to use the bracketed notation instead of the tree notation.
This is especially true when there are large parts of the sentence that are irrelevant to the
discussion at hand. Drawing bracketed diagrams essentially follows the same principles
for tree drawing (see 2.1 or 2.2 above). The exception is that instead of drawing to lines
connecting at the top, you put square brackets on either side of the constituent. A label is
usually put on the left member of the bracket pair as a subscript.
 Both words and phrases are bracketed this way. For each point where you have a
bunch of lines connecting, you have a pair of brackets.

To see how this works, let’s take our sentence from sections 2.1 and 2.2 above and
do it again in brackets:

1. First we mark the parts of speech. This time with labeled brackets:
[D The] [Adv very] [Adj small] [N boy] [V kissed] [D the] [N platypus].

2. Next we apply the AP rule, NP and PP rules:

AP:
[D The] [AdvP[Adv very]] [Adj small] [N boy] [V kissed] [D the] [N platypus].
[D The] [AdjP[AdvP[Adv very]] [Adj small]] [N boy] [V kissed] [D the] [N
platypus].

NP:
[NP[D The][AdjP[AdvP[Adv very]][Adj small]][N boy]] [V kissed] [D the] [N
platypus]. [NP[D The][AdjP[AdvP[Adv very]][Adj small]][N boy]][V
kissed][NP[Dthe][Nplatypus]].

3. Now the VP and TP rules:

VP:
[NP[DThe][AdjP[AdvP[Advvery]][Adjsmall]][Nboy]][VP[Vkissed][NP[Dthe][N
plat ypus]]].

TP:
[TP[NP[DThe][AdjP[AdvP[Advvery]][Adjsmall]][Nboy]][VP[Vkissed][NP[Dth
e][N platypus]]]].

4. Finally, go back and check that the structure can be generated by the rules.
 Coordinate structures are constituents linked by a conjunction like and or or. Only
constituents of the same syntactic category can be conjoined:

HOW TO DO FOREIGN LANGUAGE PSR PROBLEMS

There are two kinds of non-English language problems found in syntax: those that
provide a word-by-word gloss and those that don't.

A1. Doing problems with word-by-word glosses.

Often, linguistic examples from languages other than English will take the
following form (example from Sinhala – a language spoken in Sri Lanka; data from
Lehmann 1978):

74) Jōn ballavə däkka Actual language

data John dog saw Word-by-
word gloss

“John saw the dog.” Idiomatic translation

There are three lines: the actual data, a word-by-word gloss and an idiomatic
translation into English. Of these the most important for doing the problem set is the
second line – the word-by-word gloss. The glosses are lined up word for word (and
sometimes morpheme for morpheme) with the foreign language on the line above. This
line tells you (1) what each word in the foreign language example means, and more
importantly, (2) the order of the words in the foreign language. When trying to determine
the phrase structure of a foreign language or the behavior of a word or phrase, this is the
line to look at! (However, when drawing trees and citing examples in your answer it is
considered more respectful of the language to use the actual foreign language words.)
Remember: don’t do an analysis of the idiomatic translation of the sentence, because then
you are only doing an analysis of English!

Here’s a more complete paradigm of Sinhala, along with a series of typical

questions:

i) Jōn ballavə däkka John dog saw

“John saw the dog.”

ii) Jōn janēle iñdəla ballavə däkka

John window from dog saw
“John saw the dog from the window.”

APPLICATION
A. [Application of Skills and Knowledge; Basic to Advanced]
Draw phrase structure for each of the following sentences, indicate all the categories
(phrase (e.g., NP) and word level (e.g., N)) on the tree. Use the rules given above in the
“Ideas” summary of this chapter. Be careful that items that modify one another are part of
the same constituent. Treat words like can, should, might, was, as instances of the category
T (tense). (Sentences d–h are from Sheila Dooley.)
a) The kangaroo hopped over the truck.
b) Susan will never sing at weddings. [never is an Adv]
c) The officer carefully inspected the license.
d) The cat put her catnip toy on the plastic mat.
e) The very young child walked from school to the store.
f) John paid a dollar for a head of lettuce.
g) Teenagers drive rather quickly.
h) A clever magician with the right equipment can fool the audience easily.
i) The police might plant the drugs in the apartment.
j) Those Olympic hopefuls should practice diligently daily.