Constituent structure grammar
Keith Brown, Jim Miller · 2020
This chapter provides a formal and explicit grammar for the constituent structure of sentences. A grammar, lexical rule and lexicon can be used as the basis of a set of explicit rules to produce a sentence or to analyze some given sentence. The chapter describes an informal account of sentence generation assuming some informal rules in which the grammar is initially used as the basis of a ‘generator’ and as the basis of a sentence ‘parser’. A generative grammar can be thought of as a set of statements or rules that relate a sentence to its labelled and bracketed description. As the grammar is constructed on the basis of the analysis of a small set of sentences, it will also account for large numbers of sentences other than those on which it was immediately constructed. The chapter presents some exercises for generating and parsing the sentence using the sentence generating rules and parsing rules.