assign (v.)

A term used in GENERATIVE linguistics to refer to the action of rules; rules attribute, or ‘assign’, structure to SENTENCES. By the use of REWRITE RULES, a STRING OF ELEMENTS is introduced as a series of stages, each assignment being associated with a pair of LABELLED BRACKETS, e.g.

In such a way, the structure of NOUN PHRASE, VERB phrase, etc., can be assigned to any sentence to which these rules apply; e.g. [[the man] [saw [the dog]]].

assignment function In FORMAL SEMANTICS, a term referring to a FUNCTION which maps VARIABLES onto their SEMANTIC VALUES.