Introduction: the Project
Max D. Silberztein · 2016
The project described in this book is at the very heart of linguistics. Its goal is to describe, exhaustively and with absolute precision, all the sentences of a language likely to appear in written text. This project fulfills two needs. First, it provides linguists with tools to help them describe languages exhaustively (linguistics), and then it aids in the building of software able to automatically process texts written in natural language processing, or NLP. This chapter confines itself to seeking to describe the set of all of the sentences that may be written or read in natural-language texts. To describe a natural language, it firstly defines in extenso the finite number of basic units in a language (its vocabulary). Secondly, it lists the rules used to combine the vocabulary elements in order to construct sentences (its grammar).