A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
n. (CFL) 1. A formal language generated by a context-free grammar. If null productions are uniformly excluded or permitted, the set of context-free languages is a proper subset of the context-sensitive languages.
2. A natural language whose grammar can be adequately represented by such a formal grammar. At present it appears that most, but not all, natural languages are so representable, at least in terms of weak generative capacity, the ones which are not being those few exhibiting certain types of cross-serial dependencies or of reduplication.
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