On the Mechanization of Syntactic Analysis

Any language has as part of its structure patterns according to which items are arranged on each of its strata. The term tactics is widely used for the analysis and description of arrangements, and the term syntax is traditionally used with reference to arrangements on the morphemic straturn. It is in connection with that stratum that the study of tactics of greatest interest in linguistics. The items with which syntax is concerned can be of varying kinds, depending upon the school of thought. Some linguists regard the word as the basic unit of syntax; others make no syntax-morphology distinction, and we could apply the term syntax here also, with the morpheme as the basic unit. It is also possible to use items which tend to be smaller than words but larger than morphemes, and one unit of this kind is in fact what I prefer. I call it the lexeme. But for purposes of this paper, let us think of syntax as being quite general with regard to the choice of the basic unit. The technique of analysis to be discussed applies for any of these kinds of items. After all, if one goes to the trouble of writing a computer program for syntactic analysis, one ought to make it as widely applicable as possible to the needs of different linguists. Indeed, the system as described in this paper, and the accompanying computer program, could also apply to the study of arrangements of phonemes or letters or syllables or morphographernes and perhaps also various nonlanguage phenomena which tend to occur in patterned linear arrangements. In other words, it is really a systern for tactic analysis in general. At any rate, whatever unit is taken as the basis of the tactic description