Patent US 4,907,971

A method of syntactically categorizing the constituents of English language sentences and a schema for depicting all possible categories to which the constituents of any sentence could belong. It also depicts the general order to appearance of the basic elements (foundation elements) in a sentence and their alignment according to the functions they perform in a sentence, the alignment being informative to a schema user of certain relationships between constituents of a common function. In one embodiment of the schema, all possible forms and functions of foundation elements are depicted in a plurality of adjacent rows, all rows being parallel to an ordinate, each row containing only foundation elements of a common form in the general order of their common use in a sentence, the number of rows corresponding to the number of forms of foundation elements; all possible forms and functions of modifying elements are depicted in a plurality of adjacent rows, all parallel to said ordinate, each row being ordered to correspond to the foundation elements which they modify, and each row containing only modifying elements of a common form, the number of rows corresponding to the number of forms of modifying elements. In another embodiment, all forms and functions of modifiers of modifying elements are also depicted in a plurality of adjacent rows parallel to said ordinate, each row being ordered to correspond to the modifying elements which they modify, and each row containing only modifiers of modifying elements of a common form.