Syntax Tree Generator | How Language Builds Meaning
How Sentences Grow
The foundation of language is the idea that meaning is made by words in combination with each other. We add words to other words to explain our world, the tool on this page is a syntax tree generator to help you visualize this abstract combinaton. For example, the word “fuzzy” in isolation does not carry much weight on its own, but if you combine it with the word “cat” to make “fuzzy cat” you have made something with more meaning than the two words in isolation. If we add another word, we can then take “fuzzy cat” and combine it with “Persian” to get “Persian fuzzy cat” — something with even more meaning.
Everything we add to our sentence sequence gives more information in our internal conception. Linguist Noam Chomsky called this Merge and defined it as the foundation of human grammar itself.
Merge is an operation that combines two things at a time, never more than that, and what it produces then becomes the input for the next combination. This is by math definition, recursive, each step builds on the last, and does so in a structured manner. That is how something as complex as language grows from something as simple. Our “The Persian fuzzy cat” plus “sleeping” gives us more information: “The Persian fuzzy cat is sleeping.” Then we add “sun”-“The Persian fuzzy cat is sleeping in the sun.” Finally, because I want the sentence to have rich meaning, I add the word “rumpled,” ending with “The Persian fuzzy cat is sleeping rumpled in the sun.” Our ending sentence is worlds of complexity away from the two words we started with.
We can illustrate the above complexity pictorially. Interestingly, the way our words came together is different from the way we speak or write them. This tool, or syntactic tree, is a diagram of how words combine in meaning in a pictorial flow of information added step by step.
When we look at a syntactic tree, we see the output as an illustration of Merge. The bottom is where we start, in our example “fuzzy” and “cat”, and it then ends at the top with our finished sentence. As in any language, the order of words and the order of Merge produce different meanings. Language choice is deliberate.
Chomsky argues that this complexity of Merge is what makes human language unique. As a species, all languages of man follow this pattern of communication arrangement. We have a finite vocabulary that can be combined to create infinite possible sentences, there is no end of adding units together to generate new meanings. No other form of animal communication does this.
This syntax tree generator tool was made to illustrate and simplify the concept of Merge. Try creating a sequence of your own. The meaning does not matter as much as the process.
How to Use the Syntactic Merge Lab
Select words from the lexicon panel on the left and they will appear in your right hand space. Click any two words in the workspace to select them, then press the Merge button. They will combine in the tree
Keep selecting two items at a time and merging to build a sentence.
Use the tabs at the top right to explore further;
- Tree shows your structure as it builds
- Sets shows the same structure as pure mathematics
- Algebra explains the mathematical properties of Merge
- Catalan shows how many possible trees your current words could have made.
To add your own words, type them into the Custom field at the bottom of the left panel, select a category, and hit Add.
From TedEd talk by Cameron Morin “What Do All Languages Have in Common/”