Contents 1 Introduction 5 2 Preliminaries and Definitions 7 3 Conditions Placed on Derivation Domains 9 4 Conditions

The present thesis studies grammars with context conditions and their applications. In particular, it discusses sequential and parallel grammars whose derivation steps are restricted by some conditions placed on the rewritten sentential forms. According to the types of context conditions, it classifies the grammars with context conditions into three classes and sums up crucial results about them. Specifically, this classification results from the distinction between context conditions placed on (1) the domains of grammatical derivations, (2) the use of grammatical productions, and (3) the neighborhood of the rewritten symbols. In all these cases, the main attention is concentrated on establishing the grammatical generative power and important properties. In particular, this thesis studies how to reduce these grammars with respect to some of their components, such as the number of grammatical symbols or productions, in order to make the grammars small, succinct and, therefore, easy to use in practice. To demonstrate this practical use, it also discusses the applications and implementation of grammars with context conditions. Most of the applications are related to microbiology, which definitely belongs to the central application areas of computer science today.