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Chapter 12. Summary

This chapter introduces fundamental concepts in syntax using context-free grammars. Context-free grammars model how groups of consecutive words act as constituents in languages. A context-free grammar consists of rules that define a language using terminal and non-terminal symbols. Grammars are used to model the structure of natural languages. Context-free rules can represent different sentence types in English like declarative, imperative, and questions.

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46 views1 page

Chapter 12. Summary

This chapter introduces fundamental concepts in syntax using context-free grammars. Context-free grammars model how groups of consecutive words act as constituents in languages. A context-free grammar consists of rules that define a language using terminal and non-terminal symbols. Grammars are used to model the structure of natural languages. Context-free rules can represent different sentence types in English like declarative, imperative, and questions.

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Ch 12.

Constituency Grammars
12.7 Summary
This chapter has introduced a number of fundamental concepts in syntax through the use
of context-free grammars.
• In many languages, groups of consecutive words act as a group or a constituent,
which can be modeled by context-free grammars (which are also known as phrase-
structure grammars).

• A context-free grammar consists of a set of rules or productions, expressed over a


set of non-terminal symbols and a set of terminal symbols. Formally, a particular
context-free language is the set of strings that can be derived from a particular
context-free grammar.

• A generative grammar is a traditional name in linguistics for a formal language that


is used to model the grammar of a natural language.

• There are many sentence-level grammatical constructions in English; declarative,


imperative, yes-no question, and wh-question are four common types; these can be
modeled with context-free rules.

• An English noun phrase can have determiners, numbers, quanti ers, and adjective
phrases preceding the head noun, which can be followed by a number of
postmodi ers; gerundive and in nitive VPs are common possibilities.

• Subjects in English agree with the main verb in person and number.

• Verbs can be subcategorized by the types of complements they expect. Simple


subcategories are transitive and intransitive; most grammars include many more
categories than these.

• Treebanks of parsed sentences exist for many genres of English and for many
languages. Treebanks can be searched with tree-search tools.

• Any context-free grammar can be converted to Chomsky normal form, in which


the right-hand side of each rule has either two non-terminals or a single terminal.

• Lexicalized grammars place more emphasis on the structure of the lexicon,


lessening the burden on pure phrase-structure rules.

• Combinatorial categorial grammar (CCG) is an important computationally relevant


lexicalized approach.
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