LINGUIST List 6.101

Wed 25 Jan 1995

FYI: Dissertations available on WWW, Microsoft application

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. OSDL, Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics
2. George Aaron Broadwell, Linguistic applications of MS Organization Chart

Ohio State Linguistics students are now making available dissertations
written since 1992 by students in the linguistics department. For
more information regarding available titles and abstracts as of
January 1995, please visit our

 World Wide Web (WWW) Server

 at

 http://ling.ohio-state.edu/Department/Dissertations.html

For information and ordering procedures, please contact

OSDL (Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics)
Department of Linguistics
Ohio State University
222 Oxley Hall osdlling.ohio-state.edu
1712 Neil Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1289
USA

Dissertations available as of January 1995:

Benjamin Xiaoping Ao (1993)
 Phonetics and Phonology of Nantong Chinese
 (Advisor: David Odden)

Hee-Rahk Chae (1992)
 Lexically Triggered Unbounded Discontinuities in English:
 An Indexed Phrase Structure Grammar Approach
 (Advisor: Arnold Zwicky)

John Xiang-ling Dai (1992)
 Chinese Morphology and its Interface with the Syntax
 (Advisor: Arnold Zwicky)

Sun-Ah Jun (1993)
 The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody
 (Advisor: Mary E. Beckman)

Gina Maureen Lee (1993)
 Comparative, Diachronic and Experimental Perspectives on the
 Interaction between Tone and Vowel in Standard Cantonese
 (Advisor: Brian D. Joseph)

Katherine Welker (1994)
 Plans in the Common Ground:
 Toward a Generative Account of Conversational Implicature
 (Advisor: Craige Roberts)

PS: Anyone reading LINGUIST via the WWW page at Rochester may
 visit our site by simply clicking
 (A HREF="http://ling.ohio-state.edu/Department/Dissertations.html";)
 here(/A).

LINGUIST readers,

 I recently discovered an application that had been lurking on my
hard drive for a while which has turned out to have some useful
applications. The application is Microsoft Organization Chart. It came as
a part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications that was bundled with
my new Gateway. I imagine many of you may also have this application -- it
is generally associated with PowerPoint, but it can run on its own, or in
association with any other Windows program that allows object linking (OLE).

 MS Organization chart was designed for showing corporate
organization structures, and it is organized around boxes that stand in
hierarchical mother-daughter relationships to each other. The program makes
adding and deleting nodes in such hierarchies very easy, and automatically
connects then with the appropriate lines.

 I've experimented with this program and two linguistic applications:
1.) Genetic trees in historical linguistics, and 2.) Syntactic tree
diagrams. A little discussion of each:

1.) Trees for historical linguistics -- The program does a superb job at
rendering the sort of genetic trees that are conventionally used in
discussions of historical linguistics. The user can manipulate just about
every detail of the trees -- the order of branches, the types of fonts used
for the labels, the thickness of the lines that connect the nodes. There
are also options that allow the user to make any particular branch in the
tree either vertical or horizontal, which is great for fitting lots of
information onto a page.
 The resulting tree can be inserted into your other Windows
applications. I've inserted them into my WordPerfect documents, and they
work beautifully. (In WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows, I choose Insert Object
from the
menus, select Microsoft Organization Chart from the list, and create the
tree. When I'm through, the tree acts like a graphic that I can move
around, resize, etc.) On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this program a 10 for
this application.

2.) Syntactic tree diagrams

 The program is not as good at these, but it does a pretty decent
job at syntactic trees as well, and it has the virtue of being very quick
and easy.

A few notes on drawing syntactic trees:

 -- The default setting puts a box around each node in the tree, but you can
easily select the boxes and set the border to "none".
-- A more serious problem -- the default lines connecting the node are only
vertical and horizontal, not diagonal, as is standard in syntactic diagrams.
 After some consideration, I've decided that this really doesn't bother me
very much; you may disagree. It is possible to draw in diagonal lines by
hand, but I found this tedious.

 I don't know if I would advise people to buy this program just for
syntactic trees -- if the perfect syntactic tree drawing program would get
a 10, I'd give Microsoft Organization Chart an 8 - it is quick and easy, but it
doesn't do everything you might want.

Overall, I've found this piece of software to be one of the more useful I've
seen. I'd encourage LINGUIST readers to give it a try. Given the extensive
distribution of MS Office software, you or your university may already have
this.

George Aaron Broadwell, g.broadwellalbany.edu
Anthropology; Linguistics and Cognitive Science,
 SUNY-Albany, Albany, NY 12222 | 518-442-4711
 -----
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than
diagraming sentences" -- Gertrude Stein