www.entitymodelling.org - entity modelling introduced from first principles - relational database design theory and practice - dependent type theory
An Extended Example - the Structure of English Sentences
In this section we give an extended example of entity modelling by demonstrating the modelling of English sentence structure. Our starting point has been the syntactic rules presented in chapters 7 and 8 of the book of Brinton: The Structure of Modern English1. What we do in this chapter is simply to translate the structural description of English sentence structure given there from the meta notation of phrase structure grammars into the more general entity relationship notation.
This chapter is a single example of the modelling of entitites and their parts. It demonstates that phrase structure grammars can be represented as entity models.
- if you know already entity modelling then use this model as a means to explore formal grammars and the structure of English
- on the other hand if you are already familiar with formal grammars then see how an entity model can provide a single view encompassing a set of production rules.
Some background to the material in the model is contained within the remaining sections.