A phrasal template is a
phrase-long
collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...
that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases.
Description
A phrasal template is a
phrase-long
collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...
that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Often there are some restrictions on the
grammatic category of the words allowed to fill particular slots. Phrasal templates are akin to
forms, in which blanks are to be filled with appropriate data. The term ''phrasal template'' first appeared in a linguistic study of
prosody in 1983 but doesn't appear to have come into common use until the late 1990s. An example is the phrase "common stocks rose
to ", e.g., "common stocks rose 1.72 to 340.36".
The neologism " snowclone" was introduced to refer to a special case of phrasal templates that "clone" popular cliché
A cliché ( or ) is an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being weird or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was consi ...
s. For example, a misquotation of Diana Vreeland's "Pink is the navy blue of India" may have given rise to the template " is the new black", which in turn evolved into " is the new ".
Use
* The word game Mad Libs
Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game created by Leonard B. Stern, Leonard Stern and Roger Price (comedy), Roger Price. It consists of one player prompting others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud. ...
makes use of phrasal templates.
* The notion is used in natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
systems and in natural language generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics tha ...
, such as in application-oriented report generators.
See also
* Backus–Naur form
In computer science, Backus–Naur form () or Backus normal form (BNF) is a metasyntax notation for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing, such as computer programming languages, document formats ...
* Computational humor
Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research. It is a relatively new area, with the first dedicated conference organized in 1996.
Joke generators
Pun generati ...
– usage of phrasal templates for generation of joke
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, ...
s by computer
* Joke cycle
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laughter, laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with ...
* Phrase structure rules
* Phraseme
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, idiomatic phrase, multi-word expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restric ...
* Snowclone
* The king is dead, long live the king!
"The king is dead, long live the king!" is a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch in various countries. The seemingly contradictory phrase simultaneously announces the death of the previous monarch and assures ...
References
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Grammar frameworks
Syntactic entities
Computational linguistics