how to draw syntax tree diagrams

How to Draw a Syntax Tree, Part 8: A step-by-step tree-drawing guide, with gifs

I've talked previously about all the different possibilities for what constitutes a syntax tree, but not about how you get from "here's how you're supposed to represent things" to actually drawing a tree yourself. And that's a pity, because I've actually got a really nice series of steps that I've developed from teaching, TAing, and tutoring.

Here are the steps in a nutshell: I'm going to go through them one at a time.

1. Label parts of speech
2. Label main constituents
3. Draw tree

Note: I recommend doing all of these steps by hand if at all possible. You'll see from the photos and gifs below that it was easier for me to break out the paper and markers than to try to represent this electronically. If you want to type up your tree later, here are some tools for doing so, but it'll be much easier to type up from an existing handwritten draft rather than try to do the thinking and the typesetting as part of the same step. Pencil or even a chalkboard/whiteboard is often a good idea for tree-drafting, and you'll get better at figuring out spacing as you practice more.

So what do these steps look like in practice? Note that rather like learning to ride a bicycle, the extended description looks long and complicated, but with practice many of the steps become automatic with time.

Step 1: Label parts of speech

You're going to start with your sentence just written out normally – feel free to use the version that you get printed on your test or assignment, or write it out for yourself on scrap paper. If you're writing it out yourself, it's a good idea to leave extra space between the words, for the sake of the next step.

Now label each word with its part of speech (also called lexical or grammatical category). Start with the easy, obvious ones: label the nouns as N, label the verbs as V, label the adjectives (A or Adj), prepositions (P), and adverbs (Adv). Now move on to the less obvious ones, determiners (D or Det), auxiliaries (Aux), degree words (Deg), and complementizers (C ). (I've also seen degree words referred to as Mod for modifier, although I find this confusing because entire phrases can also be used to modify things.)

Possible tricky bits in this step: Some words can belong to multiple categories! For example, play can be a noun (going to a play), a verb (play tennis), or even an adjective (a play banana, as opposed to a real one). Fortunately, while play in isolation is ambiguous, it should be clear from context what category it belongs to in a particular sentence. Your course materials should include some tests for part of speech, or you can refer to these notes, these lists (but note that there are adverbs that don't end in -ly, such as often), or this set of examples.

One easy way to keep track of parts of speech is to learn a keyword or two that unambiguously belongs in each category, and then when you're trying to figure out whether another word belongs to that category, you can say "could I replace it with this other word that I know the lexical category of?" Here's a sample list:

Noun - cat, happiness
Verb - see, laugh
Adjective - blue, happy
Adverb - quickly
Preposition - in
Determiner - the
Complementizer -  if, whether
Auxiliary - could
Degree word - very, nearly

(Note: do not use "that" as a keyword, because it can be a determiner, as in "that cat", or a complementizer, as in "I saw that the cat was purring". Compare what happens when you substitute them: "the cat" but not "*if cat", "*whether cat", and "I saw whether the cat was purring" but not "*I saw the the cat was purring".  "Be" and "have" are sometimes verbs as in "I am/have a cat", sometimes auxiliaries, as in "I was laughing/have laughed" and your course may have particular conventions distinguishing them from modal auxiliaries like can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would.)

In general, this step is going to end up with essentially the same results regardless of what theory your course is using. Apart from the auxiliaries and degree words/modifiers things, the only other part where I'd expect variation is depending on how your course treats pronouns and maybe proper names, so just check whether you're using NP, N, D, etc for them.

Why are we doing this step? Rather than rushing into drawing a tree right away, this step will make sure you get all the labels for each node correct and don't forget anything. Move on to step 2 once all words are labelled.

Here's a image of step 1: I labeled the words starting with the more obvious content words and then adding in the less obvious function words, but you can do it in any order that makes sense.

Step 2: Label main constituents

Once you've gotten everything labelled, you want to figure out the constituents and the main relationships between various parts of the sentence. Your goal for this step is to get every head inside its own phrase: for every N, you need to figure out what its NP is, for every V, you figure out its VP, etc. If you're doing bar levels, you might label a couple of those at this step if you've got ambiguity or a whole lot of stuff inside a particular phrase, but for the routine bar levels you can just put them in at the next step.

There are two main ways to tackle this problem, bottom-up and top-down. They're not mutually exclusive though: just alternate between them, doing whichever is easiest until you've got all your heads inside their respective phrases.

BOTTOM-UP: Start by identifying the easy phrases that only have a word or two in them: AdjPs, AdvPs, and NPs are often fairly small. Then move on to slightly larger constituents, including PPs and more elaborate NPs (and DPs if you're using them), then VPs and finally IPs and CPs, if necessary.

TOP-DOWN: Start by identifying the verb(s): if you're drawing a sentence, there should be at least one of them.

Now, every verb has a subject, and they often have an object as well, maybe even two. You can identify these by asking questions about the sentence: the answer to "who is verbing?" is the subject, and the answer to "who is being verbed?" is the object. (The answer to "who is the object being verbed to?" is the indirect object.) And there might be other stuff that relates to the verb as well, such as an adverb or prepositional phrase.

So your subject, including associated words like determiners, adjectives, PPs, etc, needs to form an NP (or maybe a CP or DP) all by itself, while your object, also including associated words, is an NP, CP, or DP that's inside the VP. Also inside the VP (but not inside the object) might be some extra stuff, adverbs and PPs. You can indicate this with brackets around the VP, or another thing you might want to do for maximum clarity is underline the subject and object, and use arrows to point them to their verbs.

This is also the point where, if there's any movement that's going on, you'll want to "restore" the affected word(s) back to their original position(s). You may be able to do this with the same questions that you used to figure out subject and object, or if you're dealing with a question, try answering it ("What did the cat play?" → "The cat (did) play the piano", so your restored sentence is "The cat did play what?").

How do we know what's inside each of our phrases, besides the head? There are certain non-head words that typically go with certain types of heads: degree words with adjectives, prepositions, or adverbs, determiners with nouns (it's a bit more complicated if you're using DPs), auxiliaries with verbs (unless your course is putting them at I). But for phrases within other phrases, you'll have to figure it out, and that's the tricky bit.

Fortunately, there are a series of questions you can ask in order to figure out which phrases contain other phrases, and they're known as constituency tests.  Your course may give you a list of constituency tests – if not, here are two not-very-overlapping lists. Two very common types are questions and substitution. I'll demonstrate them both below for various constituents in the sentence "YouTube showed that the cat played the piano."

Questions:

• What did YouTube do? [show that the cat played the piano] - VP
• What did YouTube show? [that the cat played the piano] - CP
• What did the cat do? [play the piano] - VP
• What did YouTube show the cat played? [the piano] - NP
• What was played? [the piano] - NP
• Where did the cat play the piano? [YouTube] - NP
• Where did the cat play the piano? *[YouTube showed] -not a constituent
• Who played the piano? [the cat] - NP

Substitution:

• YouTube showed that the cat played the piano, and Vimeo did __ too. ( __ = show that the cat played the piano - VP)
• YouTube showed it (it=that the cat played the piano - CP)
• The cat played the piano, and the dog did __ too. ( __ = play the piano - VP)
• YouTube showed that the cat played it. (it = the piano - NP)
• It showed that the cat played the piano. (it = YouTube - NP)
• YouTube showed that s/he played the piano (s/he = the cat - NP)

When you figure out that some string of words is a constituent, put square brackets around it and label what kind of constituent it is (NP, PP, VP, etc). I like to do this by hand because I can make the square brackets of different sizes or colours to keep track of them all. If you find it helpful, you can also use underlining, highlighting, or circles to group other elements. (Here's an example of particularly enthusiastic colour usage.)

If we have an extra modifier of some sort, we can use the same tests to figure out what it modifies. For example, we can add several different prepositional phrases beginning with "in" to the sentence above:

YouTube showed that the cat played the piano in a blue shirt.
YouTube showed that the cat played the piano in high definition.
YouTube showed that the cat played the piano in the living room.

But [in something] doesn't necessarily modify the same thing each time, so we need to ask questions about it:

What was in a blue shirt? The cat (playing), not YouTube or the piano.
What was in high definition? YouTube's showing, not the cat or the piano.
What was in the living room? The piano (or maybe the cat playing) but not YouTube.

And based on the answers to these questions, we can mark up the sentence as follows:

YouTube showed that the cat [ played the piano in a blue shirt ]VP
YouTube [ showed [ that the cat played the piano ]CP  in high definition ]VP
YouTube showed that the cat played [ the piano in the living room ]NP

Why are we doing this step? This step is where most of the thinking happens: the goal is to know exactly what you're putting in your tree before any of the tree-drawing actually happens. Otherwise it's tempting to just draw a general shape that looks kind of like the trees you've seen before without fully examining what each part is contributing, which will end up as a mess. No really. It will.

Proceed onto the next step when: all heads (N, V, P, Adj, Adv, C, and, if you're using it, D) are inside their respective phrases (NP, VP, PP, AdjP, AdvP, CP and maybe DP). Make sure you know what the subject(s) and object(s) is/are. Also make sure that for any AdjP, AdvP, or PP that you know what it modifies and how to indicate this in the structure.

As you get more practised at drawing trees, this step will take less time and you can skip over the easy parts if you want. For example, if parts of speech are 100% intuitive to you, you may be able to go right to labeling the constituents. Or you may not need to draw brackets around all the AdjPs and NPs, you can just figure out the subject and object and any ambiguities. But even once you're fairly good at tree-drawing, if you're ever faced with an unexpectedly daunting sentence to draw, you can always fall back on step 1: label the words and step 2: label the constituents. Or, if you're drawing a really high-stakes tree, for a test or an assignment, you may still want to proceed as methodically as possible to reduce your chances of making a silly mistake.

Note that I have not gotten into sentence-level projections (i.e. S or IP or TP, whichever you're using). There's a reason for that: first of all, that's where there's the most variance between course conventions. Secondly, this is the type of projection that may not have an obvious head (unless you have an Aux and your course is treating Aux as an I head). And thirdly, you automatically need an S/IP/TP to contain your entire sentence, so it's not a particularly informative constituent to add since it will literally just contain the whole sentence. BUT, and this is important, you also need another S/IP/TP for every additional verb that you have in your sentence, because any verb and associated words (subject, object, etc) could also be a sentence by itself.

For example:

YouTube showed that the cat played the piano.

Contains two verbs, "showed" and "played" and thus two clauses, each of which could be a sentence with minor modifications:

The main (or matrix) clause: "YouTube showed…"

The subordinate (or embedded) clause: "That the cat played the piano"

So we also need to split these up. We know that "that" is a complementizer ©, so it creates a CP (or S' if you're using it), but inside the CP is an S/IP/TP (directly inside every CP, in the position of sister to the C, is an S/IP/TP).

[S/IP/TP YouTube showed [CP that [S/IP/TP the cat played the piano ] ] ]

However, if you only have one verb in your sentence, then you also only have one clause, the main clause, so you can skip this part.

Here's a gif of step 1+2: I start by labelling the words as in step 1, and then add labels for various constituents (here I am using a strict X-bar theory with IPs). I worked bottom-up from smaller to bigger groups, but you could also do a top-down approach, whatever works for you. Notice the brackets getting bigger and bigger, which is an advantage of handwriting. Leaving lots of space around the words will help fit in all the brackets, but you definitely don't need to be as pretty as I'm being here.

And here's a static image of the final result (note that I've labelled both sides of the brackets for extra clarity, but you don't have to):

Step 3: Draw tree

Now, finally, we get to draw the tree!

A lot of people think that this is the step that you start at, but unless you're dealing with a really, really easy sentence and you already have practice drawing trees, jumping right into drawing a tree will just leave you confused and not sure what to put where. It's a lot better to be confused at the previous step, where you can pause and try a couple things and figure it out, rather than at this step, where you'll be tempted to just draw something that looks basically like a tree and think "eh, good enough". Trust me, despite the fact that the rules may look confusing and arbitrary to you when you're starting out, they make good sense to your prof or TA, and it will be very obvious to them if you do that.

I'm going to point out at this stage that syntax trees are not something you can bs. However, this is in fact a great and wonderful thing, because it means that you can, with enough effort, check your own work and prove that your tree is correct (or fix it if it's not), and you are not at the mercy of dubious judgement calls and whether or not the prof likes you. A correct syntax tree is correct, a wrong (portion of a) syntax tree is wrong, and although there are a few fudgey bits in the realm of "how much do we care that this thing is wrong?", it is entirely possible to get a score of 100% in a syntax course or unit.

Syntax (and in fact linguistics in general, actually) is not one of those subjects where the prof artificially caps the maximum score at 80 or 85: if you draw a completely correct tree, or in general demonstrate a very thorough understanding of the topic, you will get full marks, and for every mark you lose, there is something very specific that you should have done differently, and most profs and TAs will tell you exactly what answer they were looking for. It's very satisfying. (I mean, until you get to high-level courses where you realize that what a syntax tree should even look like is still a matter of theoretical debate, but in an intro course there is definitely still a right answer.)

But enough with the pep talk: how do you take your now-thoroughly-marked-up sentence and make it into a tree?

You're going to start at the top. As tempting as it may be to draw your sentence along the bottom of the page and draw up from there, this is not how syntax trees are conventionally drawn. Why? Well, starting from the top gives you more symmetrically-sized branches rather than long branches on one side and cramped, tiny, hard-to-read ones on the other, as well as more space for movement arrows. It's also how the vast majority of syntax trees are drawn, and it's easier for everyone to interpret each other's trees if we follow a few basic formatting conventions.

If you're worried about spacing, note that English trees will branch more on the right than on the left, so starting your S/IP/TP about a third of the way over on the left side of the page at the very top is generally better than starting it in the middle. Or just find an empty classroom and practise on a large whiteboard/chalkboard where you don't need to worry about wasting paper. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, you can even take a photo of your whiteboard tree when you're finished, which was definitely not a thing when I was an undergraduate.

(Related: do not, for the love of Chomsky, draw your syntax trees upside-down. That is, do not write the sentence along the top of the page and draw branches down from it. I've gotten one or two of these in every stack of syntax assignments I've marked, and while I do always try to mark it as much as possible, it takes me about three times as long to figure out what's going on and hence makes me grumpy. And you don't want a grumpy person marking your assignment. If you want to instead make your marker especially happy, I have gotten some delightfully entertaining drawings from students on tests and assignments over the years, so you know, feel free.)

So you're going to start at the top of the page with your maximal sentence projection, S or IP or TP (that's S' or CP if you've got a question), and proceed down from there.

If you're using S, S will branch into an NP (subject) and a VP (containing V, the object NP, and maybe more) plus maybe other things.

If you're using IP or TP, IP or TP will branch into NP (subject) and I' or T', which will branch into I or T and VP (containing V, the object NP, and maybe other things). (Or these NPs might all be DPs, if you're using the DP hypothesis. If you've never seen a DP, just ignore everything I'm saying about them.)

Anyway, this first part is pretty much always the same for any sentence, which is why we didn't really bother map out this top projection in the previous step.

Now you're going to take the constituents that you figured out in the previous step and get them into the tree:

• What's in your subject? Put it all under that subject position.

• Make sure to include bar levels if your course is using them.

• Do you have anything modifying your verb? Put it under the VP (V' if you're using them).

• What's in your object? Put it all directly sister to your V.

• Include bar levels again if relevant.

• Do you have any embedded clauses? You've figured out what they're embedded under in the previous step, now put them there. Be sure to include a CP (S') and S/IP/TP before going into the subject, verb, etc of the embedded clause.

• Is anything ambiguous? If you figured out an ambiguity in the previous step, there are a couple ways to proceed. If your course or assignment has mentioned ambiguity as an option, you should probably draw both trees and indicate which meaning each one corresponds to. If there's a technical ambiguity but one interpretation is way more plausible than the other, and you haven't been told to find ambiguities, you may be able to get away with just drawing the most plausible interpretation (although in that case, feel free to include a note to the marker). Draw ambiguities on separate trees though, not the same one.

• If you need to draw movement, make sure you represent the original position and the moved position using whatever conventions your course is using (arrows, traces, etc).

When you think you've finished your tree, here are a few common errors that you can check:

Basic errors:

1. Did you include all the words from the target sentence in your tree?

2. Does the tree, left to right, read in the same order as your target sentence? (After any movement has happened.) If this is not the case, you need to fix something.

3. Do all the words have their part of speech labels that you established at the beginning? (Double-check the tests you used at the labelling step if you want to be really careful.)

4. Is each head inside its corresponding maximal projection? (N inside NP, V inside VP, etc.)

5. If you're doing strict X' theory, do you have at least one bar level between each head and its maximal projection? (N' between N and NP, V' between V and VP, etc.)

6. Do you have any triangles? (Your instructor may use triangles. This is why you should not.)

More specific errors:

1. If you have more than one verb, is each verb inside its own VP which is inside its own S/IP/TP? Is each non-matrix verb's S/IP/TP inside its own S'/CP?

2. Is there any movement? If it's a question, what would the statement version sound like? If there are multiple verbs, what would each mini clause sound like separately? If there is passive, what would the active version sound like?

3. What complements do you have, if any? Especially complements of PPs (generally NPs/DPs), or NPs and AdjPs (often PPs beginning with "of"). Are they in the right positions? (In X' theory, a complement is sister to the head, so complement of a noun → sister to N, complement of an adjective → sister to Adj, etc. In a theory without bar levels, a complement is simply inside the phrasal level, so complement of a noun → inside its NP, complement of a verb → inside its VP, etc.)

4. What modifiers do you have, if any? AdjPs, AdvPs, PPs…what does each modifier modify? Is it in the right position to do so? (In X' theory, a modifier is sister to the bar level of the modified element, so modifying a noun → sister to its N', modifying a verb → sister to its V', etc. In a theory without bar levels, a modifier is simply inside the phrasal level of the modified element, so modifying a noun → inside its NP, modifying a verb → inside its VP, etc. Note that if you don't have bar levels, there is no difference between a complement and a modifier.)

5. If you're in X' theory, another way of phrasing the previous two questions is: for every PP, is it a complement or a modifier? Is it in the appropriate position for which one it is? (AdjPs are almost always modifiers, unless they're after a verb: "the blue shirt" = modifier; "the shirt is blue" = complement. I can't think of any examples where an AdvP would be a complement and not a modifier, but you may want to double check just in case. And an AdvP might modify several different things, so especially check that part.)

6. What's the subject (including modifiers & complements) of each verb? Is it in the appropriate subject position that your course is using? (Under S or sister to I' are the most likely.)

7. What's the object (including modifiers & complements) of each verb? Is it sister to the verb?

8. Do you have any ambiguity? If so, have you represented it clearly?

Here's a gif of drawing the tree, again assuming you're using a strict X-bar theory with IPs (note that the colours correspond to the colours of the brackets I used at the previous step – this is for your ease in following, it's not a thing you need to do in drawing your own trees, as switching ink colours this often will probably make it harder).

And here's the final tree as a still image:

Lastly, here are the brackets and the tree side-by-side, just for fun.

Notice that subjects are in spec, IP (sister to I') of their respective IPs, and objects are in complement position of their respective verbs (sister to V). These trees assume you're doing a strict X' theory structure: if you're using TPs or DPs, feel free to substitute them instead, and if you're doing basic phrase structure rules, substitute S for IP and delete all the bar levels (just move everything up to attach directly to the phrase).

This is part 8 of a series on how to draw syntax trees. If you're confused about why I keep referring to different course conventions rather than giving a specific answer, check out the remainder of the series below.

1. So, you asked the internet how to draw syntax trees. Here's why you're confused.
2. What do we even mean by a syntax tree?
3. Type 1: A sentence is an S
4. Type 2: A sentence is an IP
5. Type 3: A sentence is a TP
6. Reconciling theories and final notes
7. Other resources and topics
8. A step-by-step guide to drawing trees, with gifs

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Source: https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/102131750573/how-to-draw-a-syntax-tree-part-8-a-step-by-step

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