Introduction

In the previous two chapters, two different ways of representing syntactic structure were presented, dependency relations and constituent structure (phrase structure). In doing syntactic analysis, it is not enough to simply represent the syntactic structure of sentences. The goal of the syntactic analysis of a language (or set of sentences from a language) is to formulate a grammar which will specify the sentences in the data. By specifying the sentences by means of a set of rules, the analyst makes explicit the structure of the sentences and expresses generalizations about them. Two different types of rules will be presented: phrase-structure rules as part of a grammar based on constituent (phrase) structure, and relational-dependency rules as part of a grammar based on dependency relations, which includes grammatical relations.

The rules of the grammar specify the way the form classes in the language may combine, and a useful distinction may be drawn between lexical and phrasal form classes. Lexical form classes are the lexical categories discussed in chapter 1, e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adposition. Phrasal form classes are constituents like noun phrase, prepositional phrase and verb phrase, which are specified by the rules of the grammar. The elements in the lexical form classes are stored in the lexicon, which may be thought of as the storehouse of the words and morphemes in the language.