Introduction to String Analysis

String analysis has developed out of an attempt to carry out syntactic analysis on a computer, just as, some ten years earlier, transformational analysis developed out of the attempt to normalize texts for discourse analysis. The arrangement of syntax for computability, following in part the method presented in ‘From Morpheme to Utterance’ (Language 22 (1946), 161–83; Paper VI of this volume) was based on an effective procedure for finding in each sentence a sequence (in general, broken) of words which was itself a sentence, belonging to a certain set of minimal sentence structures. This minimal sentence was called the center of the given sentence, and its meaning had an important and central relation to the meaning of the given sentence; this relation can be specified independently of the given sentence. The remainder of the sentence consisted of adjunctions to the center or to the adjunctions; an effective procedure was presented for an ordered determining of these adjunctions, and the ordered adjunctions had an interpretation independent of the given sentence. The original version of this analysis, made for the Univac sentence-decomposing program of 1959, is given in Computable Syntactic Analysis (TDAP 15), 1959 (Paper XVI of this volume).1