Languages · Sentence Trees
Sentence Trees
A sentence is not just a row of words: some words belong together. Build English trees step by step and watch the missing words appear, then explore real Latin and Greek sentences, or build their trees yourself.
1. English: one sentence, two trees
From the infographic How Syntax Trees Work. After “than”, English lets you leave out words the listener can rebuild. Switch between the two readings to see where the missing words go, and use the steps to build the tree from the words up.
TP is the whole clause, T the tense, VP the verb and what it acts on, NP a noun phrase, CP a clause introduced by a word like “than”, Deg a degree word like “more”. These trees follow the X-bar style taught in introductory syntax courses; textbooks differ in the details for comparatives.
2. Latin and Greek: what hangs from what
Latin and Greek word order is free, so these trees show which word each word depends on: subjects and objects hang from their verb, adjectives from their noun, nouns from their preposition. Explore a tree, or build it yourself one word at a time.
The Latin sentences are from Phaedrus’s fables, the Greek from Aesop’s; trees and grammar from the Perseus Latin and Ancient Greek Dependency Treebanks (CC BY-SA 3.0), which follow their own conventions: for example, words joined by “and” hang from the “and”. The Greek of Aesop’s fables is post-classical prose, close to Koine but not New Testament Greek. English translations written for this site.