Criteria of Evaluation
for Grammar Formalisms

• Linguistic Felicity: the degree to which descriptions of linguistic phenomena can be stated directly in the terms of the formalism rather than being ``coded up". The same criterion applies to problem oriented programming languages.
• Expressiveness: Which class of analyses can be stated at all using the formalism. For example, you can't describe a recursive phrase structure using finite state machinery.
• Computational Effectiveness: What devices exist for interpreting the grammars expressed in the formalism computationally and what their properties are.