| 释义 |
well-formed, ppl. a.
a. of persons and material things.
c1520W. Walter Guystarde & Syg. (Roxb.) A iij, Of shape and persone she was well fourmed. a1586Sidney Arcadia iii. (1922) 58 The kissing of her welformed mouth. 1645Waller Poems, Palamede to Zelinde 1 Fairest piece of well form'd earth, Vrge not thus your haughty Birth. 1653R. Sanders Physiogn. 159 The well formed head is like a Mallet or a Sphear. 1788A. Hughes Henry & Isab. xviii. II. 88 Not a pleasing view,..or a well-formed tree, was passed without furnishing matter for her observation. 1805Wordsw. Prelude vii. 206 A range Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed Upon the smooth flat stones. 1831James Phil. Augustus iv, A man of thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, tall, well-formed, handsome. 1863A. C. Ramsay Phys. Geog. 160 Well-formed flint hatchets. 1883D. C. Murray Hearts xi, He had a large and well-formed body, plump but not corpulent.
b. of immaterial things.
1643Dorney (title), A briefe and exact Relation of..Passages that hapned in the late well-formed (and as valiently defended) Seige laid before the City of Glocester. 1725Watts Logic iv. Introd., A well-formed Proposition, or a just Argument. 1746Francis Horace, A. P. 230 The Child, who now with firmer Footing walks, And with unfaultering, well-form'd Accents talks. 1759Goldsm. Pres. State Pol. Learn. xi. (Globe) 444/2 In a well-formed education a course of history should ever precede a course of ethics. 1787Burns Prol. spoken by Woods 23 Well-form'd taste and sparkling wit.
(b) spec., formed according to stated grammatical rules.
1961A. G. Oettinger in Proc. Symposia Appl. Math. XII. 104 One important common problem is that of obtaining an algorithm for distinguishing sentences from nonsentences or..well-formed strings from not well-formed strings. 1969R. A. Hall in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXX. 204 The oft-repeated claim that all ‘well-formed’ sentences of a language are derivable from a single syntactic kernel is clearly unfounded. 1980Amer. Speech LV. 90 ‘Le crabmeat cocktail’ is well-formed in that cocktail has been borrowed into French as a masculine noun.
c. Logic. Applied to any sequence of symbols conforming to the formation rules of a logical system. Esp. as well-formed formula.
1936A. Church in Amer. Jrnl. Math. LVIII. 346 We select a particular list of symbols... And we define the word formula to mean any finite sequence of symbols out of this list. The terms well-formed formula, [etc.],..are then defined by induction. 1954I. M. Copi Symbolic Logic vi. 184 In a logistic system..any formulas which on the intended interpretation do not become significant statements are not well formed formulas. 1967Encycl. Philos. V. 22/2 A formal language L is given by specifying (a) a list of symbols of L and (b) a set of formation rules for combining these symbols into acceptable, or well-formed, expressions (terms, formulas, sentences) of L. 1978A. G. Hamilton Logic for Mathematicians iii. 53 The use of parentheses in well-formed formulas is precisely given in the definition.
Hence well-ˈformedness (chiefly in Linguistics).
1957Encycl. Brit. XIV. 306/1 The condition of well-formedness [in logical formulas]. 1961N. Chomsky in Word XVII. 221 Information as to whether the sequence of phones is a properly formed or grammatical sentence and if not, in what respect it deviates from well-formedness. 1970J. P. Thorne in J. Lyons New Horizons in Linguistics ix. 186 Between..extremes of well-formedness occur sentences of varying degrees of grammaticalness. 1979F. Kermode Genesis of Secrecy iii. 64 We depend upon well-formedness..in written language. |