The GF Resource Grammar Library

The outermost linguistic structure is Text. Texts are composed
from Phrases followed by punctuation marks - either of ".", "?" or
"!! (with their proper variants in Spanish and Arabic). Here is an 
example of a text.

  John walks. Why? He doesn't want to sleep!

Phrases are mostly built from Utterances, which in turn are
declarative sentences, questions, or imperatives - but there
are also "one-word utterances" consisting of noun phrases
or other subsentential phrases. Some Phrases are more primitive,
for instance "yes" and "no". Here are some examples of Phrases.

  yes
  come on, John
  but John walks
  give me the stick please
  don't you know that he is sleeping
  a glass of wine
  a glass of wine please

There is no connection between the punctuation marks and the
types of utterances. This reflects the fact that the punctuation
mark in a real text is selected as a function of the speech act
rather than the grammatical form of an utterance. The following
text is thus well-formed.

  John walks. John walks? John walks!

