Conjunctive grammars are a class of formal grammars studied in formal language theory. They extend the basic type of grammars, the context-free grammars, with a conjunction operation. Besides explicit conjunction, conjunctive grammars allow implicit disjunction represented by multiple rules for a single nonterminal symbol, which is the only logical connective expressible in context-free grammars. Conjunction can be used, in particular, to specify intersection of languages. A further extension of conjunctive grammars known as Boolean grammars additionally allows explicit negation.
The rules of a conjunctive grammar are of the form
where is a nonterminal and, ..., are strings formed of symbols in and (finite sets of terminal and nonterminal symbols respectively). Informally, such a rule asserts that every string over that satisfies each of the syntactical conditions represented by, ..., therefore satisfies the condition defined by .
Two equivalent formal definitions of the language specified by a conjunctive grammar exist. One definition is based upon representing the grammar as a system of language equations with union, intersection and concatenation and considering its least solution. The other definition generalizes Chomsky's generative definition of the context-free grammars using rewriting of terms over conjunction and concatenation.
Though the expressive means of conjunctive grammars are greater than those of context-free grammars, conjunctive grammars retain some practically useful properties of the latter. Most importantly, there are generalizations of the main context-free parsing algorithms, including the linear-time recursive descent, the cubic-time generalized LR, the cubic-time Cocke-Kasami-Younger, as well as Valiant's algorithm running as fast as matrix multiplication.
A number of theoretical properties of conjunctive grammars have been researched, including the expressive power of grammars over a one-letter alphabet and numerous undecidable decision problems. This work provided a basis for the study language equations of a more general form.
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)