A type of grammar from the American structuralists. Phrase structure grammars describe the syntactic structure of sentences as constituent structures, i.e. as a hierarchy of ordered constituents. Insights gained from optional rules ( obligatory vs...

The mathematical study of the form of languages, i.e. divorced from properties such as meaning and use. The fundamental result of this theory is the Chomsky hierarchy: the division of language types into regular languages ( finite state automaton)....

A phrase structure grammar construction. Two phrases S1 and S2 form a self-embedded construction if (a) S1 is inserted into S2 so that elements of S2 are to the right and the left of S1, and (b) S1 and S2 are the same type of phrases (rather than...

n. A fully explicit device which specifies, for a given initial set of elements (the ‘vocabulary’ or ‘alphabet’), the complete set of strings of those elements which are in the language defined by the grammar. A grammar which is...

In formal language theory, a branch of mathematics used in both computer science and linguistics, a grammar is a precise description of a language — that is, of a set of strings over some alphabet. In other words, a grammar describes which of the...