3 ms·
Panini's grammar is closest to an instance of a Post canonical system. It is basically a set of general rewriting rules, with features going beyond BNF in power
by neel_k 9y ago
Panini's grammar is closest to an instance of a Post canonical system. It is basically a set of general rewriting rules, with features going beyond BNF in power.
This is for pretty much the same reason that the grammatical formalisms modern linguists use also go beyond BNF. Linguists are interested in issues of grammaticality that actually do need context (such as subject-verb agreement) and so obviously context-free grammars can't do the whole job!
(For a programming example, you can see type correctness as a case of how well-formedness of programs depends on context -- whether a variable can be used in an expression depends on its type.)
- sriku 9y agoPanini covered both the grammar in the regular sense as well as the phonology of the language. "Optimality theory" attempts to model phonology as a collection of violable constraints operating with a least violation principle. It is supposed to be more generally applicable to what we normally know as grammar (dealings at the words/phrases level), but has seen most success with phonology.
- dude01 9y agoThank you, that makes sense.