The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

as the term for

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

studied previously by

Emil Post Emil Leon Post (; February 11, 1897 – April 21, 1954) was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Life Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Govern ...

and

Axel Thue Axel Thue (; 19 February 1863 – 7 March 1922) was a Norwegian mathematician, known for his original work in diophantine approximation and combinatorics. Work Thue published his first important paper in 1909. He stated in 1914 the so-called w ...

( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the

Chomsky hierarchy The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a formal language's alphabet that are v ...

context-sensitive grammar A context-sensitive grammar (CSG) is a formal grammar in which the left-hand sides and right-hand sides of any Production (computer science), production rules may be surrounded by a context of terminal symbol, terminal and nonterminal symbols. Cont ...

s or

context-free grammar In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules can be applied to a nonterminal symbol regardless of its context. In particular, in a context-free grammar, each production rule is of the fo ...

s. In a broader sense, phrase structure grammars are also known as ''constituency grammars''. The defining character of phrase structure grammars is thus their adherence to the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation of

dependency grammar Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern Grammar, grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of Phrase structure grammar, phrase structure) and that can be traced back prima ...

History

In 1956, Chomsky wrote, "A phrase-structure grammar is defined by a finite vocabulary (alphabet) V_p, and a finite set Σ of initial strings in V_p, and a finite set F of rules of the form: X → Y, where X and Y are strings in V_p."

Constituency relation

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, phrase structure grammars are all those grammars that are based on the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation associated with dependency grammars; hence, phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars.Matthews (1981:71ff.) provides an insightful discussion of the distinction between constituency- and dependency-based grammars. See also Allerton (1979:238f.), McCawley (1988:13), Mel'cuk (1988:12-14), Borsley (1991:30f.), Sag and Wasow (1999:421f.), van Valin (2001:86ff.). Any of several related theories for the parsing of natural language qualify as constituency grammars, and most of them have been developed from Chomsky's work, including *

Government and binding theory Government and binding (GB, GBT) is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of his earlier theories and was ...

* Generalized phrase structure grammar *

Head-driven phrase structure grammar Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor t ...

Lexical functional grammar Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits several parallel levels of syntactic structure, including a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, an ...

* The

minimalist program In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky. Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...

* Nanosyntax Further grammar frameworks and formalisms also qualify as constituency-based, although they may not think of themselves as having spawned from Chomsky's work, e.g. * Arc pair grammar, and * Categorial grammar.

Notes

References

*Allerton, D. 1979. Essentials of grammatical theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. *Borsley, R. 1991
Syntactic theory: A unified approach
London: Edward Arnold. *Chomsky, Noam 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton. *Matthews, P. Syntax. 1981. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, . *McCawley, T. 1988. The syntactic phenomena of English, Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. *Mel'cuk, I. 1988
Dependency syntax: Theory and practice
Albany: SUNY Press. * Sag, I. and T. Wasow. 1999. Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. *Tesnière, Lucien 1959. Éleménts de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck. *van Valin, R. 2001. An introduction to syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. {{div col end Generative syntax Syntax Noam Chomsky Natural language processing