SYNTACTICA

Syntactica is a software application tool designed to let you study natural language structure in a fun, interactive way. The program provides a simple interface for:

• Creating grammars (consisting of phrase-structure rules and lexicons)
• Viewing the structures they assign to natural language expressions
• Transforming those structures by syntactic operations such as movement, deletion and copying.

Syntactica permits many aspects of syntactic theory to be explored. The rule and lexicon windows allow you to assign and control the percolation of syntactic features. The TreeViewer window lets you to perform a variety of formal operations on trees by simply pointing, clicking and using the Transforms panel. Syntactica also allows you to control various constraints on operations, including an elementary version of Subjacency.

Originally developed under NeXTSTEP, Syntactica has recently been ported to JAVA. Syntactica for JAVA is currently in beta-release and runs under a variety of operating systems, including WIN 95 (98, etc.) and LINUX.

Syntactica is designed to be used in conjunction with Grammar as Science, a companion text authored by Richard K. Larson and illustrated by Kimiko Ryokai, to be distributed by MIT Press.

Syntactica was authored by Richard Larson, David S. Warren, Juliana Freire and Kostis Sagonas. The development of Syntactica was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant USE-9150417.

Available at this point:

A brief description of Syntactica (external PDF file)

Syntactica for NeXTSTEP is available from MIT Press

Syntactica for JAVA will be available from MIT Press soon!

A screenshot of Syntactica (28.2 KB gif image)

Contact Information:

This project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation