The Archaeological Record Speaks: Bridging Anthropology and Linguistics

Table 1

The first three levels of complexity of the Chomsky Hierarchy, with a formal example of the kinds of structures each generates. A context-free grammar may keep track of the number of symbols in every subset so long as it deals with a maximum of two correlated subsets, If the same number of symbols in three (or more) correlated subsets is required within a given “formal language”, a context-sensitive grammar is required to describe it [152].

Level of complexity	Language	Sample string
Type 3, finite-state	a*b*c*	aabbbbccc
Type 2, context-free	a^nb^nc*	aaabbbcc
Type 1, context-sensitive	a^nb^nc^n	aaabbbccc