Completeness of context-free grammar forms

Abstract

The notions of a grammar form and g-interpretation were first introduced in [2]. However, it quickly became apparent, particularly for EOL forms [5], that (strict) interpretations had a wider interest as well as being better motivated mathematically. The study of parsing of grammar forms detailed in [4], the basic investigation in [8] on linear completeness amongst other results, the study of density in [9, lo] and the connections with graph theory shown in [ 1 l] have affirmed this position. The present paper continues the approach of [8] focussing on the characterization of complete grammar forms, that is grammar forms which generate all’ context-free languages. Some decidability problems will also be discussed. For further morivation and background material we refer the reader to [8, 141, while for all unexplained concepts in language theory, see [ 131. After giving the necessary definitions in the remainder of this section we characterize complete grammar forms in Section 2, 3 and 4. In Section 2 we introduce the central concept of expansion spectrum and in Section 3 the recently proved super normal form theorem [ 121, while in Section 4 the characterization is completed and generators and hierarchies are briefly mentioned. Consider context-free grammars G = (V, C, P, S), where Z is the alphabet of terminals, VZ the alphabet of nonterminals, P is the set of productions and