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Generalised phrase structure grammar (GPSG) is a framework for describing the syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 and semantics
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 of natural languages. GPSG was initially developed in the late 1970s by Gerald Gazdar
Gerald Gazdar

Gerald Gazdar is a linguist and computer scientist.He graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1970, and completed his master's degree in 1972 at the University of Reading, where he also received his PhD in 1976....
. Other contributors include Ewan Klein, Ivan Sag
Ivan Sag

Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University.With Carl Pollard, he has written several books that introduce and develop the syntactic theory known as head-driven phrase structure grammar ....
, and Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Pullum

Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguistics specialising in the study of English studies. He is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh....
. Their book Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, published in 1985, is the main monograph on GPSG, especially as it applies to English syntax.

One of the chief goals of GPSG is to show that the syntax of natural languages can be described by context-free grammar
Context-free grammar

In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a formal grammar in which every Production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of Terminal and nonterminal symbolss and/or nonterminals ....
s (CFGs), with some suitable conventions intended to make writing such grammars easier for syntacticians.






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Generalised phrase structure grammar (GPSG) is a framework for describing the syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 and semantics
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 of natural languages. GPSG was initially developed in the late 1970s by Gerald Gazdar
Gerald Gazdar

Gerald Gazdar is a linguist and computer scientist.He graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1970, and completed his master's degree in 1972 at the University of Reading, where he also received his PhD in 1976....
. Other contributors include Ewan Klein, Ivan Sag
Ivan Sag

Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University.With Carl Pollard, he has written several books that introduce and develop the syntactic theory known as head-driven phrase structure grammar ....
, and Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Pullum

Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguistics specialising in the study of English studies. He is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh....
. Their book Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, published in 1985, is the main monograph on GPSG, especially as it applies to English syntax.

One of the chief goals of GPSG is to show that the syntax of natural languages can be described by context-free grammar
Context-free grammar

In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a formal grammar in which every Production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of Terminal and nonterminal symbolss and/or nonterminals ....
s (CFGs), with some suitable conventions intended to make writing such grammars easier for syntacticians. Among these conventions are a sophisticated feature structure
Feature structure

In phrase structure grammars, such as generalised phrase structure grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar and lexical functional grammar, a feature structure is essentially a set of attribute-value pairs....
 system and so-called "meta-rules", which are rules generating the productions of a context-free grammar. GPSG further augments syntactic descriptions with semantic annotations that can be used to compute the compositional meaning of a sentence from its syntactic derivation tree. However, it has been argued (for example by Robert Berwick) that these extensions require parsing algorithms of a higher order of computational complexity
Computational Complexity

Computational Complexity may refer to:*Computational complexity theory*Computational Complexity ...
 than those used for basic CFGs.

Gerald Gazdar, and many other syntacticians, have since argued that natural languages cannot in fact be adequately described by CFGs .

GPSG is in part a reaction against transformational theories of syntax
Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....
. In fact, the notational extensions to context-free grammars developed in GPSG are claimed to make transformations redundant. Most of the syntactic innovations of GPSG were subsequently incorporated into head-driven phrase structure grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar

Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag ....
.

See also

  • Lexical functional grammar
    Lexical functional grammar

    Lexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to take....
  • Transformational grammar
    Transformational grammar

    In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....


External links

  • , containing links to publications on GPSG.