Formal Grammar & Syntactic Structure

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Abstractions about specifying and analyzing linguistic and formal-language structure, covering grammar formalisms and normal forms (conjunctive, harmonic, and model-theoretic grammar, Chomsky normal form), syntactic representation devices (phrase structure rules, nodes), dependency and locality patterns (cross-serial dependencies, subjacency), and morphosyntactic phenomena such as agreement attraction and connegatives.

16 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Affix Grammar over a Finite Lattice — Affix grammars over a finite lattice (AGFL) is a restricted type of affix grammar in which affixes can only assume finite sets of values.
• Attraction (grammar) — A language-production error in which number from a noncontroller noun intrudes on subject–verb agreement, biasing the verb toward the attractor's number.
• Chomsky Normal Form — Restrict a context-free grammar to binary nonterminal or single-terminal productions, with only a bounded start-symbol exception for the empty word.
• Conjunctive grammar — A conjunctive grammar extends a context-free grammar by allowing the right-hand side of a production to require the conjunction, and therefore intersection, of several syntactic conditions.
• Connegative — A connegative is the dependent lexical-verb form selected by a negative auxiliary in certain languages, while the auxiliary bears the clause's negation and often its finite inflection.
• Cross-Serial Dependencies — A syntactic pattern in which two ordered constituent series link in corresponding order, so their dependency arcs cross rather than nest.
• Discourse Relation — A discourse relation (also coherence relation or rhetorical relation) is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically and/or structurally connected to one another.
• Formal Grammar — A mathematically specified rule or constraint system over declared symbols that generates or characterizes the well-formed strings or structures of a formal language.
• Harmonic grammar — Harmonic grammar is a linguistic model proposed by Geraldine Legendre, Yoshiro Miyata, and Paul Smolensky in 1990.
• Linear unit grammar — In linguistics, linear unit grammar (LUG) is an approach that describes language in chunks that unfold in real time, based on the notion that language is a sequential stream of spoken or written words.
• Model-theoretic grammar — A model-theoretic grammar defines well-formed linguistic structures by constraints they must satisfy in a formal model rather than by operations that generate them.
• Morphological Derivation — A linguistic word-formation relation that licenses a distinct lexeme from a base or root by a form-and-meaning pattern.
• Node (linguistics) — In formal syntax, a node is a point in a tree diagram or syntactic tree that can be assigned a syntactic category label.
• Phrase structure rules — Rewrite rules that expand phrasal categories into ordered constituents to generate or analyze the syntactic structure of sentences.
• Reedy category — In mathematics, especially category theory, a Reedy category is a category R that has a structure so that the functor category from R to a model category M would also get the induced model category structure.
• Subjacency — A generative-syntax locality constraint under which one movement step may cross at most one designated bounding node.