A Grammar for component combination in Chinese characters
B Kirk Rankin · 1967
Phrase structure grammars are well-suited for describing natural languages or sub-languages whose sentences show an internal structure in terms of hierarchical combinations of smaller units (e.g, words or morphemes) into larger units (e.g., phrases and ultimately sentences).Phrase structure grammars are also well-suited for describing such artificial languages as some of the logical calculi and some of the programming languages.It is now suggested that modified phrase structure grammars can well describe languages other than the one-dimensional languages just mentioned.In particular, modified phrase structure grammars are wellsuited for describing the two-dimensional language of Chinese characters.The following discussion will be in three parts.First, there is a section dealing with the description of the various phenomena and processes in the language of Chinese characters.Second, there is a section in which the grammar constructed to account for this language is characterized and discussed.Finally, there is a section dealing with the evaluation of this grammar in terms of criteria originally proposed for evaluating grammars for natural languages.