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Harris expanded on Bloomfield's distributional analysis by providing a more formal approach to syntactic structure, specifically in English sentence analysis. In the 1940s and 1950s, Harris introduced the concept of immediate constituents as the parts of a sentence that can be directly combined to form larger units, such as noun phrases (NPs ...
Rudolph Carnap defined the meaning of the adjective formal in 1934 as follows: "A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are ...
Formal linguistics is the branch of linguistics which uses applied mathematical methods for the analysis of natural languages. Such methods include formal languages, formal grammars and first-order logical expressions. Formal linguistics also forms the basis of computational linguistics.
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
For example, a grammar for a context-free language is left-recursive if there exists a non-terminal symbol A that can be put through the production rules to produce a string with A as the leftmost symbol. [15] An example of recursive grammar is a clause within a sentence separated by two commas. [16]
This point is evident with the two tree diagrams above of the sentence Drunks could put off the customers, where the dependency grammar analysis of constituent structure looks very much unlike the phrase structure analysis. The crucial difference across the two analyses is that the phrase structure analysis views every individual word as a ...
First-order logic—also called predicate logic, predicate calculus, quantificational logic—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects, and allows the use of sentences that contain variables.
The introduction of quantification, needed to solve the problem of multiple generality, rendered impossible the kind of subject–predicate analysis that governed Aristotle's account, although there is a renewed interest in term logic, attempting to find calculi in the spirit of Aristotle's syllogisms, but with the generality of modern logics ...