Abstract

Some modifications are suggested to recent (1985) generalised phrase-structure grammar which make the formalism more suitable to computational use, and at the same time provide a clear and elegant redefinition for parts of the formalism which are standardly complex and ill-defined. It is shown how the feature-instantiation principles can be represented as explicit rules in a format similar to metarules, and how a grammar of four parts, immediate-dominance rules, linear-precedence rules, metarules, and these new propagation rules, can be used to produce the ordinary GPSG analyses of English. Methods of computational implementation are discussed, in particular it is suggested that the parts of the grammar are most conveniently interpreted as instructions as to how to produce a set of context-free phrase-structure rules which can be used with a simple left-corner parser.