13.2. What sentences are made up from

A sentence consists of two nouns with a verb between them. Usually, the two nouns are descriptions, as in:

Here "Mr Collins" and "a lighted room" are descriptions. But there are sentences where one or both of the nouns is a value of some other kind. For instance, in

the sentence "the score is greater than 10" consists of two number values ("the score" and "10") connected by a verb part ("is greater than").

This chapter is about getting the most out of sentences by defining new verbs to express ideas not already built in to Inform. Before we can define a new sentence verb, however, we must first look at the meanings of verbs: which Inform calls "relations".

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ExampleFormal syntax of sentences
A more formal description of the sentence grammar used by Inform for both assertions and conditions.

An entire grammar for the whole mass of Inform would not be linguistically interesting: it contains many convenient wordings which are not really part of a grand pattern. Inform does, however, have a formal notion of a Sentence, a grammatical structure which we shall call S. It is almost true that conditions ("if the flowerpot is on the wall") have the same grammar as assertions ("The flowerpot is on the wall") and "now" phrases ("now the flowerpot is on the wall"). All three use the S grammar, so we could define an assertion as "S.", say that "if S", "while S", "when S" and so on are conditions, and say that "now S" defines the "now" declaration.

Grammatical sentences do not necessarily make sense, of course. Many perfectly grammatical assertions in fact give rise to problem messages:

The wicker basket is not in the kitchen. (Unhelpfully negative.)
The wicker basket has been in the kitchen. (Talks about a time which never existed.)
The wicker basket is full. (Full of what? Too vague.)
The wicker basket is the ginger cat. (Demonstrably false.)

Whereas the first three, at least, would be sensible as conditions. So saying that assertions are "just like" conditions is a little misleading: what they have in common is S, the underlying grammar they each use as a starting-point.

To define S, we break it up into subsidiary structures. The most important is the Description Phrase (DP), examples of which include "the red basket", "somewhere lighted" and "an empty open container". Clearly sentences include DPs, but they also include other ingredients. The general pattern used in Inform is very simple:

1. S = DP + VP
2. VP = Verb + DP

where VP is another structure, the Verb Phrase. For instance:

S (The horseman wears a riding helmet)
= DP (The horseman) + VP (wears a riding helmet)
VP (wears a riding helmet)
= Verb (wears) + DP (a riding helmet)

In that example, the Verb was the single word "wears". More generally, Inform allows a Verb to include adverbs and prepositions, to be negated, and to come in any of four tenses, so the following are all valid examples of Verb in our grammar:

wore
carries
is carried by
had not been inside

Although we are not going through the definition of Description Phrases in detail, it is worth noticing how "which" and "who" behave:

3a. DP = DP + which + VP
3b. DP = DP + who + VP

Thus "an open container which is in the Ballroom" can be broken down as:

DP (an open container) + which + VP (is in the Ballroom)

To understand compounds like "something in a container", we have to invent a new grammatical structure for "in a container" and similar: let's call this a Relative Phrase (RP).

4. DP = DP + RP

Thus "an open container in the Ballroom" is DP (an open container) + RP (in the Ballroom). Relative Phrases have two different forms:

5a. RP = Preposition + DP
5b. RP = Participle + DP

so that "in a container" is an example of 5a. An example of 5b would be

RP (worn by Mr Darcy) = Participle (worn by) + DP (Mr Darcy)

That is nearly it, but not quite: we must go back to the "almost" in the statement above that assertions and conditions "almost" have the same grammar S. The difference arises from a curious irregularity in English called subject-verb inversion (see the Oxford English Grammar at 3.22F), whereby assertions can be reversed but not conditions. For instance,

In the Garden is a sunflower.

This does not follow the pattern S = DP + VP, because "in the garden" is not a DP: indeed, it is not a noun at all. To make sense of this sentence, Inform reverses it to "A sunflower is in the Garden", which does indeed follow DP + VP. Hence the final rule:

6 (assertions only). S = RP + Verb + DP

So the condition "if in the garden is a sunflower..." fails because rule 6 does not apply to the grammar for conditions: while occasional poetic uses of subject-verb inversion do turn up in conditions ("If On A Winter's Night A Traveller", say), they are rare in ordinary English usage, and illegal in Inform. That completes the S grammar, so to recap:

1. S = DP + VP
2. VP = Verb + DP
3a. DP = DP + which + VP
3b. DP = DP + who + VP
4. DP = DP + RP
5a. RP = Preposition + DP
5b. RP = Participle + DP
6 (assertions only). S = RP + Verb + DP

	Start of Chapter 13: Relations
	Back to §13.1. Sentence verbs
	Onward to §13.3. What are relations?