Example
We can describe an extremely simple fragment of English in the following manner:
Sentence → Subject Predicate Subject → Noun Predicate → Verb Object Object → Noun Noun → John Noun → Mary Noun → children Noun → parents Verb → like Verb → likes Verb → help Verb → helps
This context-free grammar describes simple sentences such as
John likes children Mary helps John children help parents parents like John
With more nouns and verbs, and more rules to introduce other parts of speech, a large range of English sentences can be described; so this is a promising approach for describing the syntax of English.
However, the given grammar also describes sentences such as
John like children children helps parents
These sentences are wrong: in English, subject and verb have a grammatical number, which must agree.
An affix grammar can express this directly:
Sentence → Subject+number Predicate+number Subject+number → Noun+number Predicate+number → Verb+number Object Object → Noun+number Noun+singular → John Noun+singular → Mary Noun+plural → children Noun+plural → parents Verb+singular → likes Verb+plural → like Verb+singular → helps Verb+plural → help
This grammar only describes correct English sentences, although it could be argued that
John likes John
is still incorrect and should instead read
John likes himself
This, too, can be incorporated using affixes, if the means of describing the relationships between different affix values are powerful enough. As remarked above, these means depend on the type of affix grammar chosen..
Read more about this topic: Affix Grammar
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