What describes a way of writing grammar information as patterns that can be used to generate further sentences?

• A. Substitution tables
• B. Grammar trees
• C. Lexical frames
• D. Clause banks

Answer: (A)

Writing grammar as patterns you can reuse to generate sentences comes from using templates with slots. Substitution tables capture these templates, letting you fill in each slot with different words that fit the required category (like a determiner, noun, verb, or object). By swapping in different items while keeping the same structure, you can produce many grammatical sentences that share the same pattern. This approach is especially useful for systematically generating language from rules, rather than just analyzing a single sentence.

The other concepts describe different ideas: grammar trees show the internal structure of one sentence, not a reusable pattern for generating many; lexical frames focus on how a particular verb combines with its arguments, not the broader grammatical templates; and clause banks are just collections of examples, not a generative pattern to produce new sentences.