Formal syntax of sentences

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:

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:

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

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:

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

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

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).

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

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

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,

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:

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: