From 1976 to 1992 he was professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Nijmegen, where he had received his Ph.D. in 1970. Since 1980 he has initiated and supervised various applied research projects dealing with the computational treatment of Dutch. In the context of a research project on grammar and writing instruction in Dutch, I have considered the problem of how to visualize aspects of the syntactic structure of sentences for primary and secondary school children. A remarkable early example, probably predating the currently fashionable syntactic tree diagrams, is Van Ginneken's 'living grammar' where the words of a sentence are represented by boys, girls and animals who jump on each other's back or shoulders, thus expressing grammatical relationships.
Sentences thus come out as pyramid-like assemblies of acrobats.
Click HERE to see this curious slide show together with Van Ginneken's explanations. The text is in Dutch. A framework for incremental syntactic tree formation . Kluwer Academic Pub-lishers. An incremental procedural grammar for sentence formulation.