Odoje, C.O.2026-02-1320160022-5401ui_inbk_odoje_role-basedl_2016https://repository.ui.edu.ng/handle/123456789/12158In: Taiwo, O. and Yuka, L.C. (eds) New Findings in West African Languages and Literature: In commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of West African Linguistic Society (WALS) pp. 342- 349The principles which govern ways words can be combined together to form phrases and sentences in natural language is known as syntax while formal syntax is not a matter of experience (unlike natural language), but stipulations in order to provide a specified set of strings in a computer programming language. The focus of this paper therefore, is to explore linguistics as the dual planes of theory and practice, by interrogating how PROLOG was used to capture English/Yoruba natural language syntax in a rule-based machine translation. The study reveals that the machine was able to generate sentences, break sentences into phrases and words in a bid to translate them in both languagesenPROLOGNatural LanguageFormal LanguageSyntaxMachine TranslationOther