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   TreeBuilder Overview  

What is TreeBuilder
TreeBuilder is a fully functional editor for creating and displaying syntactic trees. TreeBuilder was designed to aid linguistics students in understanding generative grammars and in drawing trees, to assist instructors in demonstrating linguistic concepts in the classroom and to help researchers in creating graphical representations of trees for inclusion in websites or papers.

TreeBuilder combines an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface with a fully functional and customizable tree editor to allow both students and teachers to start creating professional looking trees immediately.

In addition to drawing syntactic trees, TreeBuilder allows for the specification of a grammar consisting of phrase structure rules and a lexicon to which the trees can be checked. The grammar and/or lexicon can be easily added by either the student or teacher. There is suppport both for X-bar and non X-bar structures.

TreeBuilder also provides support for Transformational movement and insertions.

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How can TreeBuilder be used
TreeBuilder has many uses for both students and teachers of syntactic theory. They include:

Creating Trees for inclusion in web sites or documents - Tree Builder allows for the saving of a tree as a JPEG image which can then be added to documents or websites. Formatting options available in TreeBuilder enable the user to tailor the layout of the tree to their liking.

Demonstrating syntactic concepts in the classroom - TreeBuilder can be used in computer-equipped classrooms to walk the students through the process of creating trees and to quickly create trees as a visual aid in demonstrating syntactic concepts.

Creating assignments for students - In addition to providing students with an easy-to-use editor for creating trees, TreeBuilder allows for the specification of a grammar consisting of phrase structure rules and a lexicon which can be saved as a project file and distributed to students. Comments, which could contain the details of an assignment, can also be included in the project file. Students can then create trees within the project file and compare the trees to the provided grammar.

Practice exercises - The ability to easily add or modify a grammar within TreeBuilder provides an opportunity for students to create their own grammars and test which trees are compatible with various grammars.

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TreeBuilder System Requirements

64 MB RAM minimum
128 MB RAM recommended
100 MB hard disk space (includes space for Java Runtime Environment (JRE))

Windows:
  • Intel Pentium 166 MHz or higher (or compatible)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Home/Windows XP Professional (with Service Pack 1)/Windows 2000 Professional (with Service Pack 3)/NT 4.0 SP6a/98(1st and 2nd editions)
Linux:
  • Intel Pentium 166 MHz or higher (or compatible)
Generic Unix:
  • Intel Pentium 166 MHz or higher (or compatible)

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Copyright © 2004 Laura Marik and David Dever. All rights reserved.