Syntax

This article introduces some of the phenomena that theories of natural language syntax aim to explain. It briefly discusses a few of the formal approaches to syntax that have figured prominently in computational research and implementation. The fundamental problem of syntax is to characterize the relation between semantic predicate-argument relations and the superficial word and phrase configurations by which a language expresses them. The major task of syntactic theory is to define an explicit notation for writing grammars. This article details a framework called transformational grammar that combines a context-free phrase-structure grammar with another component of transformations that specify how trees of a given form can be transformed into other trees in a systematic way. Finally, it mentions briefly two syntactic systems that are of linguistic and computational interest, namely, generalized phrase structure grammar and tree-adjoining grammars.