This paper describes on-going research into the applications of some techniques normally used to formally specify and analyze the context-sensitive syntax of programming languages to the specification and analysis of the syntax of a natural language, namely English. The specific formal methods presently being investigated are the Two-Level-Grammer (2LG) and the Vienna Definition Language (VDL). A preliminary subset of English has been established consisting of fifteen basic sentence patterns. 2LG and VDL specifications are given for one of these sentence types and the syntactic analysis of an English sentence using each of the two specifications is illustrated through an example.

--Authors’ Abstract

The proposed example is well formed to illustrate the applicability of 2LG and VDL to specify and analyze the syntax of a simple class of English constructs. Both formal methods are presented intuitively and effectually, so that no special prerequisites to understand this paper are required. The paper is a short, readable, and interesting report on the preliminary results of the authors’ approach. Work on extending the chosen subset, as well as implementing VDL and 2LG, is in progress.