Phrase structure

Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax, and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, being first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

Phrase structure rules are usually of the following form:

meaning that the constituent ${\displaystyle A}$ is separated into the two subconstituents ${\displaystyle B}$ and ${\displaystyle C}$. Some examples for English are as follows:

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