This manual -- and accompanying software -- introduces Syntactica, an innovative teaching tool that is designed to let the user explore natural language structure in an engaging, interactive way.

Syntactica, which was produced as part of a National Science Foundation initiative for improving instruction in linguistics, provides a simple interface for creating grammars, viewing the structures (trees) that they assign to natural language expressions, and transforming those structures by grammatical operations. A guiding theme in its development is the study of linguistics as a way to further scientific reasoning skills.

While designed primarily for undergraduate students, Syntactica can also be used by professionals as a "derivation calculator" in following out complex syntactic derivations involving many steps and operations. Furthermore, the graphical interface can be used to create high-quality, camera-ready tree images that can be scaled and edited, and incorporated into publications and presentations.

Manual plus NeXTStep software for PCs and NeXTStations running NeXTStep version 3.2 or higher.

More on Syntactica...

Syntactica demo! [NeXTStep only]