Syntactic structure and ambiguity of English

This paper is in two parts. The first (Section 2) gives an evaluation of the performance of the multiple-path syntactic analyzer to date, with emphasis on the nature and the consequences of syntactic ambiguities in English sentences and suggestions for the refinement of the grammar. The remainder of the paper is concerned with certain concrete implications of the theoretical description of multiple-path predictive analysis provided by recent work of Evey and Greibach. A modification of the form of the current grammar is proposed which should yield a new grammar with additional intuitive appeal, a simplified version of the present analysis program, and sentence structure descriptions in the form of a generalized parenthesis-free notation readily interpretable as a tree.