A Two-Stage BNF Specification of Natural Language
Naomi Sager · Journal of Cybernetics · 1972
This paper presents a method of using BNF to specify natural language in such a way that a relatively small grammar of English can express the major grammatical constraints of the language and can be refined without undue proliferation of the rules. The results show that the departures of natural language from a context-free language are of a very restricted kind. The analysis obtained for sentences of the scientific literature is relevant for information processing