grammar - Is there an Extended Backus–Naur form (EBNF) that covers all of English?


Is there an EBNF (Extended Backus–Naur form) that covers all of English, and if so, what is it?



Answer



No.


It's been well demonstrated in the linguistic literature that natural human languages, including English, cannot be captured in a context-free grammar.


Here's a link for you (PDF): Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?