A phrasal template is a
phrase
In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...
-long
collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...
that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases.
Description
A phrasal template is a
phrase
In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...
-long
collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...
that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Often there are some restrictions on the
grammatic category of the words allowed to fill particular slots. Phrasal templates are akin to
forms, in which blanks are to be filled with appropriate data. The term ''phrasal template'' first appeared in a linguistic study of
prosody in 1983 but doesn't appear to have come into common use until the late 1990s. An example is the phrase "common stocks rose
to ", e.g., "common stocks rose 1.72 to 340.36".
The neologism " snowclone" was introduced to refer to a special case of phrasal templates that "clone" popular cliché
A cliché ( or ; ) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or literal and figurative language, figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being b ...
s. For example, a misquotation of Diana Vreeland's "Pink is the navy blue of India" may have given rise to the template " is the new black", which in turn evolved into " is the new ".
Use
* The word game Mad Libs makes use of phrasal templates.
* The notion is used in natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
systems and in natural language generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. A widely cited survey of NLG methods describes NLG as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that is concerned with the ...
, such as in application-oriented report generators.
See also
* Backus–Naur form
In computer science, Backus–Naur form (BNF, pronounced ), also known as Backus normal form, is a notation system for defining the Syntax (programming languages), syntax of Programming language, programming languages and other Formal language, for ...
* Computational humor – usage of phrasal templates for generation of joke
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, ...
s by computer
* Joke cycle
* Phrase structure rules
Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural langu ...
* Phraseme
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, multiword expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restri ...
* Snowclone
* The king is dead, long live the king!
References
{{reflist
Grammar frameworks
Syntactic entities
Computational linguistics