grammar
A formal definition of the syntactic structure of a language (see syntax),
normally given in terms of production rules which specify the order of
constituents and their sub-constituents in a sentence (a well-formed string in
the language). Each rule has a left-hand side symbol naming a syntactic category
(e.g. "noun-phrase" for a natural language grammar) and a right-hand side which
is a sequence of zero or more symbols. Each symbol may be either a terminal
symbol or a non-terminal symbol. A terminal symbol corresponds to one "lexeme" -
a part of the sentence with no internal syntactic structure (e.g. an identifier
or an operator in a computer language). A non-terminal symbol is the left-hand
side of some rule.
One rule is normally designated as the top-level rule which gives the structure
for a whole sentence.
A grammar can be used either to parse a sentence (see parser) or to generate
one. Parsing assigns a terminal syntactic category to each input token and a
non-terminal category to each appropriate group of tokens, up to the level of
the whole sentence. Parsing is usually preceded by lexical analysis. Generation
starts from the top-level rule and chooses one alternative production wherever
there is a choice.
See also BNF, yacc, attribute grammar, grammar analysis.
Nearby terms:
GRAIN « grain « GRAM « grammar » grammar
analysis » grammatical inference » Grandfather,
Father, Son
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