Phrase structure grammar has several different common meanings.
In mathematics, in the area of formal language theory, it is often used as a synonym for context-sensitive grammar, which uses phrase structure rules or rewrite rules. However, it is not a precise term, and may also be used to refer to other classes of grammar in the Chomsky hierarchy that are more powerful than context-free grammars.
In linguistics, it refers to any one of several related theories for the parsing of natural language, including the head-driven phrase structure grammar, the lexical functional grammar and the generalised phrase structure grammar. The subject divides clauses into two constituents, the noun phrase (NP) and the verb phrase (VP), reminiscent of the more rudimentary linguistic syntactical analysis, that of subject and predicate. From these the subject works down to the individual words within the sentence, parenthesising phrases according to the clauses' words' form classes in a way universally applicable to the English language.
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