Such grammars also describe the relation between form and meaning of the utterances in a given natural language. The grammar must distinguish the meaning of sentence (1-a) from the meaning of sentence (1-c). For the non symmetric verb love the difference in syntactic order corresponds not only to a difference in grammatical function (such as subject, direct object), but also to a difference in semantic roles (e.g. who is loved, and who is loving). Syntactic analysis will therefore determine the semantic interpretation.
In linguistics, grammars can play various roles. For example in theoretical linguistics they are sometimes considered as models of the knowledge native speakers have of their language. In computational linguistics, another perspective is taken: computational linguistics is about the computation of the relation between form and meaning in natural language. Thus, rather than focusing on what the relation between form and meaning is, computational linguists want to know how this relation can be computed. Suppose we have a grammar of Dutch and we are given a Dutch sentence, how can we compute its corresponding meaning? And in the reverse direction, suppose we are given a certain meaning, how can we compute a Dutch or an English sentence expressing that meaning? Thus, computational linguistics is concerned with the way in which natural language is or can be processed.
