phrase-structure rule

American  

noun

Linguistics.

1. a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.

---

phrase-structure rule British  

noun

1. Also called: rewrite rule.  generative grammar a rule of the form A → X where A is a syntactic category label, such as noun phrase or sentence, and X is a sequence of such labels and/or morphemes, expressing the fact that A can be replaced by X in generating the constituent structure of a sentence Compare transformational rule

---